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THE WDDD LOT 

"small A3 THE WDDD LOT IB, THERE IS POETRV AND 
PEACE IN IT, AND I CDME ALMOST DAILV TD GET THE 
REFRE3HMENX aF IT. THIS WAS MV FAVERITE SPOT 
IN THE SUMMERS DF MV CHILDHDDD.AND ITS CHARM 
AND MVSTERY LINGER ETILL" 



THE JOURNAL OF A 
COUNTRY WOMAN 



BY 



EMMA WINNER ROGERS 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



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Copyright, 19 12, by 
EMMA WINNER ROGERS 



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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Wood Lot — Photogravure Frontispiece ^ 

Facing Page 

The Green Side of the Palisades i6 (^ 

"The Old Homestead — Was Built about 1758" 191/ 

A Dutch Colonial Farmhouse in Our Neighborhood.... 29 t/ 

The Road to the Station 39 ^'' 

A New Member of the Family 43 •/ 

The Palisades and the River 49 V'^ 

Our Next-Door Neighbor's Home 50*^ 

Our Next-Door Neighbor's Kitchen 53 ^ 

Bringing Home our Team of Oxen 60 v 

Wild Carrots Near the Wood Lot 71 v' 

Bringing in Our Last Load of Hay 71 vz 

The End of the Road 80 

The Oldest Houses in the Neighborhood 85/ 

Parlor Cupboard of an Old Dutch Farmhouse in the 

Nearby Village 87 ^ 

A Real Holland Interior 87 \/ 

The Top of the Palisades cj2^ 

The Schoolmaster's Ancestral Home 103 u' 

The Century-and-a-Half Old Inn 103 i'^ 



FOREWORD 

The delight of living near to nature, among 
green and growing things, sunrise and sunset 
within our horizon, is an end sufficient in itself. 
There is an added happiness and value in the 
founding of a country home which shall pass 
from generation to generation of our successors. 
It must appeal to thoughtful men and women 
now that the search for physical and mental 
health has become a nation's business. 

The restlessness of the average family, mov- 
ing from house to house or apartment to apart- 
ment, always dissatisfied but ever hopeful of 
better and healthier environment, is proof of the 
need of a permanent foothold in the country as 
the abiding place of the family, where all go- 
ings forth "to see life," as Bunty's brother puts 
it, may end happily and safely. 

While the world revolves we can never escape 
toil and trouble, cares and fears, but we can get 
strong and free and joyful in the country, ready 
to bear our burdens with smiling faces and 
steady nerves. With our children, our friends, 
our dogs, our kindly domestic animals, and our 
household treasures about us we can grow into 

5 



FOREWORD 

the likeness of the ideal man and help on the 
material and moral welfare of the race. 

I am indebted for several of the photographs 
to Mr. George Taylor, Miss Matilda L. Haring, 
and Mrs. Tallman, all neighbors of the Old 
Homestead and descendants of the earliest 
settlers. E. W. R. 



THE JOURNAL OF A 
COUNTRY WOMAN 

Aliens! Whoever you are, come travel with me! 

Traveling with me you find what never tires. 

The earth never tires, 

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; 

Nature is incomprehensible at first. 

Be not discoiuraged; keep on; there are divine things 

well enveloped, 
swear to you there are divine things more beautiful 

than words can tell. — Whitman. 

March First. If I were to the manner bom, 
keeping a journal would never occur to me, I 
suppose, for all these brimming country days 
would be second nature and not take hold as 
they do of my inner consciousness and photo- 
graph themselves there as red-letter days, too 
fair to be forgotten. No, I belong to that in- 
creasing company who are the country's by 
adoption, and have come back to it after a few 
generations of tasting the fruit outside the 
Garden of Eden. To tell the truth, getting 
back has been pretty nearly as hard as if real 
cherubim with real flaming swords — whatever 
they may be — stood on guard to prevent a re- 
turn. The true tug of war is that one realizes 
so fully — at least I do — the tremendous allure- 
ment of the city, the joy of its constant htmian 
fellowship and cooperation, the stimulus of all 

7 



THE JOURNAL OF ; 

the spiritual and intellectual forces of the city. 
Multitudes in the country are continually re- 
sponding to this appeal and to the city's more 
material attractions, and leaving the country, 
until where we have come, as in every real 
country neighborhood, the signs are unmis- 
takable of the countryside missing its native 
fostering children. 

I remember Lester F. Ward said a few years 
ago about this ruralization of the city popula- 
tions and urbanization of the country popu- 
lations that both were due to the general fact 
that rural conditions can only be appreciated 
through culture, while in the present state of 
society, culture can only be acquired at centers 
of population. He would admit, of course, how 
everything has wrought in the past few years 
to stimulate and broaden country life, how 
closely it has come into touch with the city's 
progressive life, and the city with the country's 
boundless gifts of health and beauty and wisdom. 
Yet his words are not so far from the truth even 
now. The country dweller seeks the keener life 
and fuller opportunities of the town by a law 
as] instinctive as that which draws the over- 
stimulated urbanite to an atmosphere where 
he can invite his soul and renew his relations 
with nature and with animal life. 

8 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

Perhaps the sound and sane way of life is 
the old-world one of making the real home, the 
permanent family home, in the country, and 
going to the town a few weeks or months of the 
year. This has always had followers here 
among those having an opportunity of choice. 

I was not ventiu'esome enough to cut myself 
off completely from the complex life that is 
second nature to me. I hear people talk of 
burning their bridges behind them, and it has 
its advantages, but I am not made up on that 
plan. I am no "plunger," to use a board of 
trade euphemism. I like to see my way out — 
or perhaps I ought to say more justly, I want 
the earth — the joy and health and loveliness of 
the blessed country, and a little share in the 
city's inspirations and intimate fellowships. I 
have simply turned about my usual method of 
life and shall live the greater part of the year 
in the country, making it a permanent home, 
and if the work and the animals permit, shall 
stay in town two or three months in mid- 
winter. 

The things I wanted to do and never found 
time for I mean to do now, and one of them is 
to keep a journal of events and impressions of 
daily life, a little record of the passing show we 
call living; and living is so real and vital in the 

9 



THE JOURNAL OF 

country! We are in touch with elemental 
things. Brief, bare record of events I tried to 
keep, but there are long intervals when life 
was fullest that are all blank pages. To keep 
a calendar of engagements, and the household 
accounts tolerably straight, was nearly all that 
swift-flying time permitted in the day's work. 
Here there is time for an occasional peaceful 
hour in which to put down in this journal some- 
thing about our daily living and thinking in 
this new environment. Country days are so 
much longer than elsewhere. My frequent so- 
journs there had impressed this upon me, and 
it was one of the many reasons why I came 
"back to the soil." I can't explain the marvel 
of it, but just take it blissfully. I have come 
where being is more than knowing, and I en- 
joy my limitations. I rise in good season, but 
the sun is already rejoicing on its way, and the 
four-o'clock bird chorus is over and done. The 
trees are discoursing gently with the morning 
breeze when I go out of doors. The cows have 
been in the pasture long enough to be now only 
browsing calmly or standing, mild-eyed, chew- 
ing their cud and gazing on the green loveliness 
of the morning. After breakfast is over and I 
have been at work indoors and out a long time, 
I glance at the clock to satisfy my conscience 

lO 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

in quitting work now, and lo! it is only ten 
o'clock! Two long beautiful hours yet to noon. 
And afternoon seems like a lifetime to be lived 
through. 

Hurried and harried by the rushing days of 
the city, here I hug myself in the huge content 
that life is long, that there is plenty of time 
and I shall catch up with myself and feel the 
ease and restfulness which one dreams of or 
remembers from the times of childhood. 

In the town the hours are winged, as if you 
put out your hand to catch a flitting bird and 
felt his downy plumage brush your hand as he 
slipped away into the distance. It is noon 
before one's work seems well begun. Night 
comes down with you breathless from the 
effort to get tolerably through the day's work 
and to have a breath and sight of sunlight on 
the quieter streets or in the park. Dear cotm- 
try days — with time enough for everything, how 
I rejoice in the endless hours between dawn 
and soft darkness! 

March Eighth. We moved to the country 
very early, about the middle of February, for 
so much needed to be done in settling the home 
and adjusting ourselves to the new environment 
before the busy season really opens. The coun- 
try is wonderful in winter — more solemn and 

II 



THE JOURNAL OF 

still than in spring and summer, but there are 
sights and sounds in the skies and forests and 
fields that thrill one, and hints of spring come 
with the lengthening days of late winter. No 
matter how snowbound the lawns and meadows, 
or icebound the streams and ditches, the earlier 
dawns and longer twilights and other cheering 
signs sound the note of joyful anticipation to 
the nature lover's heart that the eternal miracle 
is brooding within the ancient earth and in due 
season will greet us in song and leaf and blos- 
som. We sense 

The infant harvest breathing soft below 
Its eider coverlet of snow. 

The bare trees show their strength and grace 
and make poignant music with the winter 
winds. The dull browns and greens of the 
fields contrast with the brilliant skies and crisp 
air to make glad one's heart; or if a soft gray 
pall hangs over meadows and woods, it meets 
our rainy-day mood and emphasizes our har- 
mony with external nature. 

"Live thou in nature!" sang our people's 
poet, Richard Watson Gilder: 

Let the hushed heart take its fill 

Of the manifold voice of the trees, 
When leafless winter crowns the hill 
And shallow waters freeze. 



12 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

Let not one full hour pass 

Fruitless for thee, in all its varied length; 
Take sweetness from the grass, 

Take from the storm its strength. 

It was last year's winter visit to the country 
when a fierce February storm worked its wild 
will in fields and woods and orchards and on 
the highways, snapping off telegraph poles and 
great tree limbs, filling the roads with high 
drifted snow and hanging twig and branch with 
icicles, that suddenly revealed to me the neces- 
sity of living in the country and decided me to 
go back to the soil before I must go finally to 
mingle with and become a part of it. 

If the storm had not settled it for me, the 
glory and shining beauty of the day after would 
inevitably have done so. That next morning 
was as we dream the celestial country may be. 
It was marvelous Nature in her wedding gar- 
ments when the sun began to touch the ice- 
laden trees and bushes and the white beauty 
of the fields. 

The air was crystalline, the skies clear winter 
morning blue, the trees weighted and broken 
with their burden of glinting, opalescent ice, 
reflecting every beam of sunlight, each twig 
sparkling in rainbow colors. One breathed in 
from that keen, untainted, sun-pierced atmos- 
phere a new delight in mere living and breath- 

13 



THE JOURNAL OF 

ing; a high joy mingled with praises for soul 
and sense to feel the divine beauty of life as a 
whole. 

Yet I confess the storm and its sequence 
were but the occasion of my decision, for the 
thought of making a country home had been 
revolving in my mind a long time, growing 
apace and fostered by the possibility and hope 
of sometime getting possession of my grand- 
father's old homestead, so full of childhood's 
memories of long summer visits year after year 
and of outdoor delights. 

It is amazing strange how our lives are in- 
fluenced by haunting early memories which 
build themselves into our mature plans and 
purposes. The man of large affairs, appar- 
ently guiltless of sentiment, dreams of boyhood 
days in the country, of green lanes and running 
brooks and woods paths and resolves to live 
again in his boyhood happy land. The sim- 
plicity and sincerity of his country life, with 
its environment of natural beauty, its intimate 
relations with animal life, its touch of mystery 
from being at the source of things, stay with 
him as an ideal of the true life to which all his 
work and ambition will pay the tribute of sur- 
render some sane day. 

The child determines the man in many 

14 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

subtle ways, and it is by no chance that much 
of the world's creative work is done by those 
who have lived their early life close to nature 
and amid simple conditions. It is every child's 
right to be born and raised in the country, and 
failing this, to live there as much as possible 
during the earliest years. Other environing 
impressions fade or exert comparatively small 
leavening power, but the purling of a shallow 
brook over shining stones and through sedgy 
grasses will sing forever in his memory. The 
odor of newly turned sod or of the clover- 
scented hay in the fields will remain and stir 
a whole world of glad and simple memories. 
And the beauty and reality of a world with 
flowers, and trees, and birds, and green hills, 
and low-lying pastures with brown browsing 
cattle, will live on in the child and the man as 
voices from the kingdom of God. 

Finding a country home is one of the diffi- 
culties which discotirage a good many people 
who want to make their homes in the country 
for all or part of the year. Mine was ready to 
hand, and none of the finer country houses, 
larger acreages or more beautiful views or en- 
vironments made me swerve a hair's breadth 
in my choice. I could afford to smile at the 
tribulations of my farm-hunting friends, at 

15 



THE JOURNAL OF 

their disappointments and disillusionments, for 
my country home held all of the past for me, 
and all its timbers and its very soil were 
precious — the quaint old well, the great walnut 
trees on the lawn, the back brook with its 
wobbly bridge, the butternut tree by the front 
brook — yes, and all the neighborhood, with its 
picturesque Dutch colonial homes, its nearby 
unspoiled and unchanged villages, and the 
green side of the Palisades looming up in front. 
To settle anywhere in the country hasn't 
half the charm or the chance of success as to 
have some sentimental or practical reasons for 
choosing a certain locality and environment. 
Not being farmers or gardeners by inheritance 
or training, the pure cultivation of the soil by 
greenhorns is likely to be disappointing and 
expensive, and the primitive conditions and 
comparative isolation are more than likely to 
be the undoing of the new country dweller. It 
is much the wiser to choose a region which has 
some associations for one, if that is possible, 
even if no old homestead opens its welcoming 
doors, or to go near where a few congenial 
friends have gone. Above all, it is wisdom to 
go with a lot of sentiment, a big supply of con- 
tent, and an abiding determination to fit into 
the life joyfully and resourcefully. 

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1 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

Everything seemed to combine finally to 
make my dreams of country life come true. 
My lord and master found his work would 
permit of several months of country life with- 
out let or hindrance and going back and forth 
in other months would not be too burdensome. 
The quiet of the country would be a boon to 
me in my own work and leave some time for 
me to farm besides. Then we both realized we 
should get enough of joy and health and length 
of days from the change to much more than 
compensate for minor inconveniences and even 
the surrendering of some ties and associations. 
Our two nieces, Amelia and Angelica, who 
spend much time with us, adore the country, 
and while they are both in college now, will be 
factors in making the country home festive and 
in sharing, too, its work and responsibilities, 
being girls with sensible training. I have tried 
to impress them with the value, not only of a 
sound general education, and of the minor 
graces and accomplishments, but also with the 
wisdom of fitting for definite work in the world 
in addition to being good housekeepers. Every 
girl who isn't stupid and who has proper home 
training can be a reasonably good housekeeper 
by the time she is eighteen, or before she enters 
college. Amelia is taking the fiill college course 

17 



THE JOURNAL OF 

in agriculture at Cornell University, and An- 
gelica is at Dickinson College and expects to 
go into Settlement work. 

One of our house servants, a faithful colored 
man who has been with us twenty years, needed 
the country for health reasons and has come 
with us. He can't adapt himself easily to 
changed conditions, but time will help, and so 
our household is sure of not being entirely 
servantless. For just this is held up as the ter- 
ror of country life, and we are prepared for the 
worst, but willing to run the risk. 

The Old Homestead was the home of my 
maternal grandfather and is in Jersey's lovely 
Hudson valley, not too remote from the great 
city. My grandfather had lived the city life 
of his day, and had been drawn to make a 
summer home in this quiet valley by his child- 
hood memories of it when his parents had fled 
there from New York during the Revolutionary 
War and made it a temporary home. In middle 
life he quitted business and city life after a 
successful and satisfying career and made his 
permanent home here to the end of his long 
and serene life. He had purchased "all that 
Messuage and Dwelling or Mansion house and 
three lots of land," as the old deed has it, of a 
descendant of one of the old Dutch settlers. 

i8 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

The tract of land of which this was a part had 
been granted by Governor Dongan in 1687, to 
Dr. George Lockhart, a London physician, and 
covered over three thousand acres. A few years 
later this great tract was sold to a group of well- 
to-do Dutch and Huguenot settlers, who di- 
vided it, established substantial homes and 
fruitful farms, and whose descendants still 
occupy a large part of it. If one thing in this 
changing world is more helpful and delightful 
than another, it is to see and to live among 
such evidences of permanence as this. The 
neighboring townships for miles around were 
all settled at the same or an earlier date by 
the Dutch and Huguenot colonists, to whom 
were patented tracts of land of from one to 
three thousand acres, which they divided ami- 
cably among themselves and proceeded to lay 
out in farms and gardens, and to build of en- 
during stone their comfortable Dutch colonial 
farmhouses. On both sides of my grand- 
father's place houses of just this type stand, 
and in the one on our right live the descendants 
of the fine old Dutch settler from whom he 
bought his "Mansion house and three lots of 
land." 

The Old Homestead was built about 1758, 
and is in the Dutch Colonial style with some 

19 



THE JOURNAL OF 

changes of later years. The first story is of 
stone covered with stucco, and the second 
of frame with overhanging roof and dormer 
windows. My grandfather added a wing to 
the house, and the old stone separate kitchen 
was taken down at that time, but a big brick 
oven was built out from the more modern 
kitchen, and as a child I remember seeing the 
bread and pies and cakes drawn out from this 
oven by a long-handled wooden implement not 
unlike the wooden snow-shovel of to-day. 

The kitchen fireplace is immense; a smaller 
one is in the big dining room and there are 
great fireplaces in the sitting room and the 
parlor. Everything is simple, strong, and sub- 
stantial, and the house is set upon a gentle rise 
some distance from the road, as the Dutch loved 
to place their homes with a sloping lawn and a 
large garden to the south. About twelve acres 
of land surround it, running back to a wood 
lot. 

Here my grandfather founded a real home 
and lived a real and joyful and beneficent 
life. In the mountain cemetery of the nearby 
beautiful river village his ashes repose and my 
great-grandfather's, with many of their chil- 
dren and grandchildren. 

• The inviolability of the home and the sacred- 

20 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

ness of the family hearth-fire are among the 
traditions we need especially to cherish in our 
modem life. The vast old Dutch-tiled fire- 
places in this old home seem to call me to keep 
the hearth-fires burning, and to-night the big 
back-log in the fireplace reddens with the fire- 
light around which the same family has gath- 
ered for a hundred years. 

"In the country," writes Charles W. Eliot, 
"it is quite possible that a permanent family 
should have a permanent dwelling. To pro- 
cure, keep, and transmit such a homestead is a 
laudable ambition." And this country life in 
a permanent home he names as a most im- 
portant means of perpetuating good family 
stocks in a democracy. 

March Twelfth. We are having fine sunny 
days and I have taken the opportunity to 
tramp all over the place, and make some plans 
about its division into fields for certain crops 
and to decide what needs to be done in the way 
of repairing fences, opening ditches, and clear- 
ing up the wood lot. A lovely wide brook runs 
across the entire place back from the house 
about two fields. There are deep, dark places 
in the brook, and old trees line its banks and a 
wagon bridge crosses it. A few trout flourish in 
it, and as I know the State furnishes fish for 

21 



THE JOURNAL OF 

stocking streams, I shall apply and stock our 
brook. I remember catching an eel in the 
brook when I was about six years old, and being 
so scared with its weight and appearance that I 
handed the pole and line very unceremoniously 
to an older cousin, who succeeded in landing 
the catch. 

We have had temporary outdoor help since 
we came to the country, but yesterday I en- 
gaged a Slav who claims to know how to farm 
and garden, and who looks sturdy and clean. 
His name is George — I can't remember the rest 
of it on account of the over-numerous conso- 
nants. I am to pay him twenty dollars a month 
and board and lodge him. There is a frame 
kitchen separate from the house with a good 
room above, and here George will be lodged. 
He is over forty, I should think, and has been 
in this country five years, leaving a wife and 
three half-grown children in the old country. 
He told me with a good deal of pride that he 
had sent home over eight hundred dollars to 
his family. 

I am to be the farmer and the Slav will work 
under my direction, and I only hope he has 
the disposition and intelligence to carry out 
orders faithfully. I am prepared for almost 
anything in the way of disappointment, for 

22 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

every farmer has his tale of woe about farm 
labor. We shall probably need another man 
through the busy season, and I hope to find an 
intelligent young German- American who will be 
specially good in the care of the stock and 
chickens. 

I believe the detailed care which women 
are accustomed to give to their usual work 
is just what is needed to bring up to a high state 
of cultivation the so-called worn-out farms of 
the East, and farming seems to me a peculiarly 
fitting occupation for women. It is not a new 
thing, either, for there have been successful 
women farmers and ranchers for a long time, as 
well as many women gardeners. I was reading 
recently of Henry Clay's estate at Ashland, Ken- 
tucky, of six hundred acres, and the writer said 
Clay's wife was the better farmer of the two and 
took entire charge of the estate while Clay was 
in public life, and showed a good profit from the 
raising of fine stock and the sale of butter, eggs, 
and poultry. The United States census of 1900 
showed over three hundred thousand women 
farmers and gardeners, and I am sure the 
ntimber has nearly doubled since, for schools 
and colleges in nearly every State in the Union 
have in the few years past been training young 
women as well as young men for agriculturists. 

23 



THE JOURNAL OF 

My summer observations and experiences, 
with considerable reading on the subject, have 
prepared me fairly well to be the farmer with a 
reasonable chance of success. Hired farmers, 
as a rule, are a delusion and a snare. The really 
well-trained and reliable men turned out by 
the agricultural colleges must either go to 
farming for themselves or else are snapped up 
at high salaries by the owners of big estates, 
for they are not to be had by the average well- 
to-do farmer. So that unless one of the family 
can undertake the farming, and risk learning 
how to do it by experimenting, I would strongly 
advise keeping away from the country, or from 
ownership there. No matter whether your 
farm has seven or seventy acres, hiring a farmer 
will spoil all your comfort, eat up your profits, 
and cause you to beat a hasty retreat cityward. 
Besides all the small experiments I had known 
of and their failure, friends who owned large 
estates and went in for fancy stock and all 
kinds of high farming warned me never to try 
farming with a hired farmer at the helm. The 
only way if one wants some comfort and pleas- 
ure, and not too much loss in their country 
home investment, is to be your own farmer. 

This isn't much of a farm when it comes to 
size, but enough to tax my knowledge and skill, 

24 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

for I am going to do intensive farming and try- 
to bring every foot of land finally to a high 
state of ciiltivation, which for me will be more 
practical and profitable than to attempt half- 
way cultivation of a hundred acres. This plan 
has its good citizenship side also, for I shall be 
helping to solve the problem of how to furnish 
a more abundant food supply for the people at 
reasonable prices. Everywhere one hears some 
measure of the hard times and high prices laid 
to slovenly farming, to growing sixty bushels 
of potatoes on an acre which should produce 
two hundred, and it is all too true. It is true 
also that the farmers are generally too poor to 
carry out high cultivation, and alas! if they 
don't carry it out, they as well as the country 
are sure to be poorer still. 

March 28th. A real March storm to-day 
and no promise of clearing for some time. I 
think of the stored-up water in the soil which 
this long, cold rain means, and of how it will be 
drunk up from below later by the rootlets of 
all the plants. This makes the rather dreary 
storm seem a cheering event after all, and it is 
giving me a chance to adjust myself to the new 
environment and new plans, and to realize the 
new riches of time for thought and feeling — 
for living indeed. 

25 



THE JOURNAL OF 

I begin to realize, too, with some definiteness, 
the mental and physical stress and strain under 
which I had been living for so long. Yet it was 
a life crammed full of real work, and real pleas- 
ures and heart- warming friendships. But to 
achieve any definite good or usefulness in it 
meant a strenuousness of living not compatible 
with one's ideals. Most of the work seemed to 
lead nowhere, the pleasures were crowded in 
and hurried through breathlessly, and the 
friendships were suffering for the refreshment 
of renewal by leisure and thought and contact. 
They lived on famishingly, but seemed to say, 
"We would be a source of upspringing joy and 
inspiration were there but time." 

I have a real admiration and respect for 
one of my city circle who said she long ago 
made up her mind to live for and with her 
friends. And she does this and is apparently a 
happy woman and a joy and comfort to her 
friends. 

But not all of us could settle on something 
wise and delightful and say, "This one thing I 
do." She is unmarried and has a competence. 
Then she must have great singleness of pur- 
pose and force of character to choose and stick 
to a single purpose in life amid such a bewilder- 
ment of paths appealing to us to walk therein. 

26 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

For most of our circle the home, society, 
philanthropy and social reform, church life and 
work, and some chosen individual work or 
career for ourselves, all made such insistent 
demands in our lives that we compromised by 
trying to respond to all or most of these de- 
mands as well as we could, and flesh and spirit 
were inadequate to it. 

This reminds me of an English critic*s recent 
estimate of our American life, G. Lowes Dickin- 
son. To soften the blow he relates it as a sort 
of vision appearing to him when, after seeing 
the wonders of Niagara and while sitting on a 
bench by the swift-nmning river, a voice re- 
peated over and over — he could see no face — 
'All America is Niagara. Force without direc- 
tion, noise without significance, speed without 
accomplishment!" Which dream, of course, 
needs a spiritual interpretation. 

The inner circle of like-minded souls among 
us understand that we are in a transition stage 
for all highly civilized humans, and especially 
for womankind, who must manage and adjust 
the complex business of the home and social 
life and share largely also in the broad thought 
and work of the outside world. 

To simplify one's life so that the best is pos- 
sible, both in the making of a home and in 

27 



THE JOURNAL OF 

sharing the work and uplift of the world life, Is 
the problem we are to work out. I think it is 
Bliss Carmen who says, "Simplicity consists in 
freedom from overmuch possession," and adds: 
"It is not good for you to live richly in cities, 
because it is hard to deny yourself. . . . You 
must think of the luxury of freedom, so you will 
enter into possession of yourselves; and you 
will be glad and free and creative and strong." 

We can do away with half the problems, so 
called, of modern life by going back to the 
country, taking with us the real gold of modern 
life and leaving the dross. What a brainless 
thing for everybody to crowd into the cities, 
thereby making the social and civic problems 
of city life, and then stay there spending much 
of their lives in trying to help solve them! 
Better lead the way back to the country and 
solve in this way a real part of our own and the 
city's problems. 

April Fifth. The daffodils have poked their 
fiat green shoots far above ground, and to my 
delight they are in clumps half-way down one 
side of the lawn as they used to be when I came 
here as a child. The look and odor of those 
daffodils stand out as clearly to me as when 
they bloomed afresh here. To me there is no 
flower more bewitching and suggestive. No 

28 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

color or odor of flowers ever seems so pure and 
perfect. They come so early and seem so hardy 
and joyftd, with the promise of the stmimer in 
their lovely fragrance and color. The old 
garden has a bed of them too and of tulips and 
hyacinths. The stored-up sweetness of mother 
earth is in the odors of these early flowers, so 
rich and wonderftil in color and form. The 
blessed things do not need to be pampered like 
frailer flowers, but make their way up through 
the rich loam of old gardens in strong, swaying 
bunches or on old-fashioned lawns, seeming re- 
lated to and harmonious with the green grass 
beside them. 

There are no crocuses about, but I shall plant 
the bulbs in the best cleared part of the wood 
lot, and lily bulbs too. The land there is rather 
low and moist, and it is almost a woods garden 
now with quantities of ferns, native orchids, 
and other wonderful woods and swamp flowers. 
When all this region was owned by the early 
Dutch settlers I can fancy that their orderly 
gardens were gay with the blooms of fine Dutch 
bulbs brought or sent over from the mother 
country, the land of famous bulbs. And I want 
to have as nearly as I can what the Dutch 
settlers and their earliest successors had, and 
to live much as they did, continuing newer 

29 



THE JOURNAL OF 

customs only where they are greatly superior 
to the old ones. We have given up so much 
in our modem hurry and worry which we 
should always have kept, and which people 
with souls are gradually getting back to. 

The old garden is much as it was long ago, 
lying on a gentle slope toward the south. A 
long pathway leads down the middle to the very 
end, with a grape arbor over some distance of 
the middle of the path and borders for flowers 
on both sides. A great walnut tree stands in 
the lower left-hand comer of the garden, and as 
nothing would grow in the shade of this tree, 
we children made it one of our play spots and 
also a burying ground for unfortunate birds. 
Not far from this we had tiny gardens of our 
own, and there was much rivalry as to the 
products of these gardens. 

The hotbed was in the upper left-hand 
comer of the garden, and there we shall have it 
again, and grow the plants to set out in the 
garden. There is a greenhouse less than two 
miles away, where one can go to piece out 
failures, and we shall doubtless need to pat- 
ronize it. Wonderful rhubarb, the big kind, 
used to grow in the garden, and thick-stalked 
asparagus, peas tender and sweet as we never 
get them from the markets, and many other 

30 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

vegetables, besides luscious strawberries and 
raspberries and blackberries, and currants and 
gooseberries. The garden has been fairly well 
kept, and by setting out and renewing certain 
things we shall have a fine and fruitful garden 
after a year or two, and a very good one even 
this season. 

The flower beds were along the front fence 
of the garden as borders, and the only flowers 
I remember in these are the old-fashioned ones, 
peonies, tall phlox, johnnie-jump-ups, pinks, and 
roses, especially a lovely moss rose. A great 
lilac bush grew by the garden fence on the lawn 
and there it is still, only taller and more spread- 
ing. Near the house were bushes of exquisite 
yellow roses that seemed to bloom all the sum- 
mer long, and a climbing single red rose went 
up to the second story windows on the garden 
side of the house. Such roses are still found in 
neighboring old gardens, and I shall plant them 
where they used to grow. The stone walls of 
the north side of the house are grown over 
with English ivy. 

I have had George the Slav plow the left 
side of the garden and the lower half of the 
right side and break up the clods with the spade 
and then rake it all over until the ground is 
smooth and the soil fine enough to rub through 

31 



THE JOURNAL OF 

one's hands and find no big lumps. This has 
taken several days and was preceded by put- 
ting on a thick layer of fine barnyard manure. 
The success of the garden depends so much 
on this preliminary work. The rest will have 
to be spaded up, as there are many roots and 
plants which must not be disturbed. This part 
of the garden was heavily mulched in the 
autumn, and when the coarser mulch is raked 
off and the roots and berry bushes dug around, 
it will be in order, and as the days pass the 
rhubarb will be spreading its pale green, curled- 
up leaves on the soft ground, preparatory to 
shooting up big pink-lined stalks, and later the 
asparagus tips coming up swiftly out of the 
earth, the strawberry leaves putting on a 
brighter green, and all the bushes and roots 
busy day by day with the task of putting on 
their beautiful spring garments, and maturing 
blossoms and fruit. This is the part of the 
garden which seems almost htunan in its 
helpfulness, and gives joy and fruitage while 
we are toiling and moiling over the planting 
and tending of tiny seeds elsewhere in the 
garden. 

April Fifteenth. There is a lot in heredity 
when it comes to plant life, whatever may be 
the case with hiunans. It is economy to buy 

32 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

your garden seed from trustworthy seedsmen. 
I have studied the catalogues of two of the 
best houses and selected what I believe we can 
grow satisfactorily in this particular garden. I 
shall have it planted in long rows, instead of 
beds, and about eighteen inches to two feet 
apart, so that the hand or horse cultivator can 
do most of the cultivating. Otherwise it would 
take the whole time of one man to take care of 
the garden. A week ago I had George the Slav 
sow long rows of spinach in the mellow earth, 
and to-day radishes, lettuce, and early beets, 
and put out a row of little onion sets. Later he 
will plant beans, peas, and com, and then later 
still will come the setting out of early cabbage, 
tomatoes, peppers, and cauliflower and cucum- 
ber plants which are now well started in the 
hotbeds. Then will come the daily endless 
cares of the garden, a delight as well as a task, 
and a task adapted to the abilities of every 
member of the family and warranted to renew 
the health of the fortunate laborers. 

George the Slav might be a good deal worse 
than he is, and I try to bear this in mind while 
I watch and direct him. He has the will of a 
mule, and it takes tact and moral force to per- 
suade him to do things my way rather than his 
own. He thinks he knows how, and pretends 

33 



THE JOURNAL OF 

he doesn't understand my orders, but by fol- 
lowing him up and persisting and insisting on 
his doing as I direct, he finally yields. He is 
very quick, strong, and quite thorough, so 
much so that there was danger of things being 
dug up by the roots, rather than gently spaded 
among; but he is learning, and if we can spend 
much time telling and watching him, he will do 
very well. He knows a good deal about farming, 
and has plowed and harrowed an acre of ground 
and sowed it to oats and cow-peas for an early 
fodder crop. 

May Tenth. It is amazing and refreshing to 
notice the general exodus of city people to 
make their homes in the country. No doubt the 
movement is accelerated this year by the early 
spring and the very high cost of living in town. 
But the same thing has been going on for 
years among increasing numbers — the giving up 
of restricted and expensive quarters in the city 
and choosing a home with few or many acres 
in the country. The suburban movement pre- 
ceded it and continues unabated. But going to 
the real country is infinitely more interesting, 
wholesome, and economical. Suburban life lacks 
the stimulus of city life and is generally incon- 
venient and expensive. It is real wisdom for 
the overcrowded tenement dweller to get a little 

34 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

home in a suburb, but a country home with at 
least a few acres is far more satisfactory for the 
well-to-do city dweller. 

This general movement back to the soil is 
not a mere fad or passing sentiment. It is a 
return to normal life which has been largely 
eclipsed in the last few decades by the mad 
rush for material gain, by the marvelous inven- 
tions in machinery, causing a revolution in 
manufacturing, through which labor was drawn 
out of the homes and small shops into great 
factories. A reaction was sure to come. This 
love for the soil, for nearness to nature and 
animal life is a too deeply rooted instinct to be 
permanently lost. And the new recognition of 
the health, long life, and serenity of soul which 
follows living near to nature and breathing un- 
tainted air has hastened the return to the 
country and renewed the interest of the wise 
in the pursuit of agriculture. It is a return, in 
a sense, to the faith of the fathers, and to their 
practice, too. It was Thomas Jefferson who 
said, "Those who labor in the earth are the 
chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen 
people." And Washington went joyfully from 
the presidency of the United States to the re- 
tirement of his great Virginia estate with the 
desire to spend his remaining days there in farm- 

35 



THE JOURNAL OF 

ing. He accepted the Presidency as a stem and 
necessary duty, but his expressed ambition was 
to be the leading farmer of America. Washing- 
ton Irving says of him, "Throughout the whole 
existence of his career, agricultural life appears 
to have been his heau ideal of existence, which 
haunted his thoughts even amid the stern 
duties of the field, and to which he recurred with 
unflagging interest whenever enabled to indulge 
his natural bias." What an uplift in our public 
life it would mean if its leaders to-day had 
something of Washington's poise, serene dig- 
nity, and sound appreciation of the true relative 
values of things! 

Those were the days when the large majority 
of our people lived and worked in the country. 
We were an agricultural people with the growing 
power to supply ourselves and most of the world 
with the chief essentials of life. For fifty years 
past the trend has been constantly cityward 
and factory ward. The growth of manufac- 
tures has not been left to develop according to 
need and to our superior natural advantages, 
but a high tariff policy against foreign manu- 
factures has hastened us into a great manufac- 
turing people with the working people shut up 
in factories, foundries, and shops, and the 
managers, superintendents, and capitalists in 

36 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

offices, shops, and city homes. The workers 
are huddled together in dreary, unsanitary tene- 
ments under the shadow of the factories and 
foundries, and a ceaseless tide of poverty- 
stricken though energetic foreigners have by 
millions recruited our labor class, and compli- 
cated our social problem. 

We are now an amalgamated nation of "all 
sorts and conditions of men" from every land, 
and our cities are the despair of publicists. 
With the increasing struggle for life, and 
with the growth of this renewed love of 
nature and appreciation of the freedom and 
health of country life, the tide seems to be 
turning toward this sane and normal life. But 
not on the part of the people who need it most. 
The overcrowded tenement dweller with his big 
family is held by stem conditions, or often by 
preference, to his city environment. It is the 
educated, the professional and business classes 
which chiefly are returning to the country. 

This last fact begins to complicate pretty 
seriously the farmers' trying problem of farm 
help. This is the country's problem now, how 
to secure an adequate supply of trained labor 
to cultivate the land. Science applied to farm- 
ing makes a certain skill and training necessary 
for the farm laborer, and the lack of such help 

37 



THE JOURNAL OF 

sends many farmers back to the towns dis- 
couraged. 

The present high prices are credited partly 
to our defective agricultural conditions. Mr. 
James J. Hill says they are due to a shortage of 
farm products, and that this is caused by the 
lack of scientific and progressive methods of 
farming. Secretary of Agriculture Wilson says 
too many people are trying to get along without 
working, and there are not enough in the busi- 
ness of producing something; that there are not 
enough farmers and too many agents for the 
distribution of food products, and that there 
are too few farm laborers because of this class 
of men flocking to the cities. It is absolutely 
certain that scarcity of farm labor curtails 
largely the production of the farms, and that 
little of the labor to be had is intelligent and 
skillful enough for modem farming. 

So we have come into a world of activity 
which has its own problems and needs just as 
the city has, and even more vital and interest- 
ing. It is highly important that intelligent 
people should come back to the land and help 
to solve some of these problems. I believe too 
that the great development of agricultural 
schools in many universities, the teaching along 
these lines in elementary schools, the growth of 

38 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

farmers' institutes and granges, and especially 
the government's activity through the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture, will speedily help to im- 
prove conditions in the country and bring up 
the products per acre to somewhere near the 
standards of England, Holland, France, and 
other lands now so far ahead of us. 

May Twentieth. There are charming drives 
in this region, and none more so than the road 
to the station. This is especially fortunate, for 
I frequently take this drive twice daily in tak- 
ing my lord and master to the station and 
bringing him home. It is less than two miles, 
and is more like a natural park than a simple 
country road. The fences are covered for long 
distances with wild honeysuckle and other 
vines, and the air is laden with delicious fra- 
grance. In the early morning, when we go to 
make the seven-thirty train, the world is in- 
describably lovely, the trees in their first pale 
green verdure, the apple blossoms making a 
pink and white glory in the old roadside or- 
chards, the nearby fields so green and velvety, 
and the distant hills just coming out clearly 
from the blue mists of the early morning. And 
the late afternoon drive has charms of its own 
almost as moving. 

May Twenty-fifth. The stocking and 

39 



THE JOURNAL OF 

equipping of even a little farm is a very im- 
portant matter if success in farming is one's 
aim, and it is an expensive undertaking, too, 
in these days of soaring prices. In spite of the 
vogue of motor cars for both business and 
pleasure, the prices for horses have steadily 
advanced, and horses are indispensable for the 
farm. 

I have bought a substantial team of young 
work horses and a good driving horse, not a 
fancy one. I shall indulge in no extravagances, 
but the essentials will cost a considerable pile 
of money, and it remains to be seen whether 
my farming and gardening will pay a reason- 
able interest on the cost of the plant. It is 
quite stirring to think about this home in the 
country being a business venture, and I am 
spurred to get up mornings at daybreak hours 
to speed on the good work. I am beginning to 
think the life here not so much less strenuous 
than in the city, only so much more worth 
while and physically stimulating. 

I want a team of oxen very much, for old 
times' sake, and because they are such gentle, 
friendly creatures, and strong, moving as if 
there were plenty of time to live and work. 
But it seemed wiser to postpone indulging this 
desire until I was well started in farming, or 

40 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

at least until I had time to look up the practi- 
cal value of these poetic creatures. 

A farm wagon, station wagon, and a run- 
about, a plow, harrow, cream separator, small 
gasoline engine, harnesses, and varieties of 
farm and garden tools, are some of the many- 
things I have had to buy, and every day de- 
velops a new need. Instead of "shopping," I 
make weekly pilgrimages to the agricultural 
implement store in the neighboring town and 
feel very much at home among the polished 
plows and hanging rakes and hoes, and the 
multitude of solid and attractive tools and 
machines in the big store. I am thinking of 
having this motto hung up in the barn: "Take 
care of the tools and the tools will take care 
of you." Farm machinery and tools are shame- 
fully abused on the average farm; left to dry- 
out or rust or get broken, and their usefulness 
sadly damaged by this carelessness, not to speak 
of the loss of their beauty. I have had put up 
by our village carpenter a model machine and 
tool house, after my own design, with hooks 
and shelves and every convenience for all the 
machinery and tools likely to be needed on this 
small place, and have made a rule that every 
machine must be kept in its place and every 
hoe, rake, spade, shovel, scythe, sickle, or any 

41 



THE JOURNAL OF 

tool whatsoever, must be properly cleaned and 
hung on its own particular hook. George the 
Slav is not very orderly, but by repeated telling 
and showing he is beginning to put things in 
their places once in a while. Andreas, the 
sixteen-year-old Italian boy whom I have hired 
for the busy season, is a marvel of orderliness 
and has taken the tool house under his especial 
care. He will not go to bed nights until every- 
thing is in its place in the tool house and the 
door locked. Last night he was wandering 
around with his lantern trying to find a miss- 
ing hoe, and finally found it on the ground in 
the garden where George had left it. 

Buying the cows I felt was too important to 
trust to my own judgment, for these were to be 
the chief maintenance of the farm. So I com- 
missioned the expert at the State Agricultural 
College to select five Jersey cows for me, two 
thoroughbreds, registered, and three high grades, 
all to be guaranteed to give thirty pounds or 
more of milk daily, testing five and a half per 
cent butter fat. These he selected in New York 
State on one of the great stock farms. So far the 
result is very satisfactory. The cows are beauti- 
ful and promise to pay for their board and make 
a nice profit besides. They are a continual 
source of interest and pleasure. Their feeding 

42 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

is a fine art in a way, with a view to keeping 
them slick and healthy while giving an enormous 
yield of rich milk. They have nice, comfortable 
stalls, well ventilated, plenty of salt and good 
water to drink, and twice a day a generous feed 
of corn-on- the-cob meal, gluten meal, and wheat 
bran, mixed and fed dry, and varied half the 
time with cotton-seed meal in place of gluten. 
Then all the "roughage" they will eat up clean, 
which means hay or cornstalks. We have no 
silo as yet, but must build one if I succeed 
fairly well with the little farm. A dairy farmer 
would say I couldn't succeed without one. 

I find caring for animals is almost like caring 
for one's family. They need comfort and nour- 
ishing food, gentle treatment, and considerable 
affection and interest if they are to be at their 
best. Now that Princess Georgie has a fine 
little calf I feel that a new member of the 
family has arrived, and many calls and much 
attention has greeted the proud mother and 
her newborn offspring. 

This is the continual miracle of the farm 
and the country life, nature's annual renewal 
of the garb of youth, and animal life bringing 
forth after its kind with such pride and re- 
joicing. Besides the sturdy little calf there are 
fifty downy little chicks playing about their 

43 



THE JOURNAL OF 

white-washed coops, and answering to the 
clucking of their proud mothers, and half that 
number of fluffy, yellow ducklings waddling 
about their home inclosure. Then the garden 
is a perpetual delight and has been prolific in 
asparagus, spinach, and rhubarb, with the 
promise of a bountiful supply of good things 
as the season advances, and the planted fields 
are greened over where a few weeks ago tiny 
dry, gray seeds were sown in the dull-brown 
earth. In the country we live in the midst of 
miracles and there is such an inspiration for 
praise and thanksgiving. One seems to have 
come into closer contact with reaHties and 
with the Eternal Creator and renewer of life. 

June Second. The wood lot is now in its 
full glory and a treasure house of solitude, quiet 
beauty, and perennial joy. The approach to 
it is fairly high and dry ground, with scat- 
tered trees and a lively growth of the graceful 
wild carrot. As you enter its denser growths 
your feet must tread on countless wild flowers, 
and farther in it is somewhat swampy and the 
flowers change to bog grasses, ferns, and water- 
loving wild orchids and like-natured plants. 
Small as the wood lot is, there is poetry and 
peace in it, and I come almost daily to get the 
refreshment of it. A wonderful little glade with 

44 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

a deep, dark spring attracts me oftenest, and as 
I cross the brook on the well-worn bridge and 
walk up the green slope and down its other 
side on the tree-shadowed turf to the spring a 
tide of charmed memories rise. For this was 
my favorite spot in the summers of my child- 
hood, and its charm and mystery linger still. 
Then the path from the brook diverged, that 
to the right leading to the spring with its 
overhanging trees, while the other led to "the 
little red house," a small, deserted house which 
took firm hold on my childish imagination and 
became the center of interest. 

We were never tired of entering the house 
by the small front door, or the back door or 
through the cellar, and exploring its very 
limited interior, and of trying to find out who 
had lived here and why it was forsaken. It 
was on the edge of the wood and near no road, 
but the spring and the brook and the green 
glade with near-by woods made it a spot to 
weave romances around and stir wonder in 
childish minds. The green slopes and the 
wood lot are just the same, and the spring and 
the brook have lost none of their charm, but 
the little red house is gone, and only the foun- 
dation stones and shallow cellar mark where 
it stood. 

45 



THE JOURNAL OF 

I have some interesting plans for this pic- 
turesque spot, but not to be revealed now, for 
talking about one's dreams and plans seems to 
prevent their realization. The charm vanishes, 
and the energy to bring things to pass fails in 
the face of discussion and criticism. My lord 
and master, while the most amiable of men 
and a joy to live with, is yet somewhat averse 
to getting off the beaten track, so if I have any 
vagrant plans I develop them quietly, other- 
wise his discouraging assumption that it isn't 
worth while might bring them to an untimely 
end. If we only undertake what is really and 
fundamentally worth while oiu: activities will be 
very limited; and then who can say beforehand 
what is surely worth while? I have always 
longed to be a Quaker and follow "the inner 
light." To do what the spirit moves one to do 
is perhaps the nearest intimation one has of the 
wisdom of a given way. 

June Seventh. Coming to live in the coun- 
try, one of the first questions to ask oneself is, 
What am I going to do for the common life of 
the community where I hope to gain so much 
for myself? The country needs us far more 
than the city we leave, for there are fewer who 
can help here and harder conditions have made 
people more self -centered. Cotmtry life merely 

46 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

through its comparative isolation is likely to be 
more self -centered. Among real country peo- 
ple, with the incessant industry of the life 
where one thing seems pressing on the heels of 
another to be done, neighborliness and com- 
munity interests give way before the urgency 
of work and need on the farm itself and in the 
farm family of humans and animals. I had 
noted in my country sojourns how this narrows 
the life, and in a sense had seen readily enough 
its inevitableness. But I came to the country 
determined not to grow so absorbed in my own 
affairs as to forget my duty to my neighbor 
and community, and I really have no such 
excuse for it as the native farmer has. 

The city, whether you will or no, trains its 
children, save the hopelessly selfish, in co- 
operative efforts for the common good. We 
leave our personal work to share in the work of 
betterment for the city, its schools, playgrounds, 
tenements, reformatories, orphanages, settle- 
ments, and a score of other helpful agencies, in 
one or more of which every good citizen is 
enrolled as a helper. Far less of such co- 
operative work is needed in the country, and 
much less time can be afforded for social and 
community interests, for there is no leisure class 
in the country. All are at work in one depart- 

47 



THE JOURNAL OF 

ment or another of the farm factory — shall we 
call it? And there is no putting off gathering the 
harvest when it is ripe, picking the apples before 
the windstorm shakes them down, banking the 
celery in season, setting out trees or plants when 
the soil is right, feeding the stock and poultry 
daily, and a hundred other insistent duties of 
the country life. 

The country needs the development of the 
human side, a broader and more stimulating 
social life, neighborliness, community interest, 
and helpfulness. And it is coming in these 
modern days. The true joy of living is to 
share in the common life and to be broadened 
and uplifted by it. This was the philosophy 
and the religion we brought with us to the 
country, and it will fit as well here as in the 
city. 

Now that we are fairly settled and our re- 
joicings and congratulations have become more 
subdued, my curiosity and conscience are both 
awakening to the environment and what it 
shall mean to us and we to it. I want to know 
all my neighbors and many of the people in 
the villages nearest me, especially the people 
who may need me, to whom my coming and my 
home as a kind of social center shall mean 
some help and cheer, an opportunity for real 

48 







THE PALISADES AND THE KIVER 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

human relationships. In turn I need their 
friendship and experience. 

The nearest village is almost entirely Italian, 
and made up of agriculturists and a few people 
who work in very small artificial flower and 
cigar factories right in the little village. The 
station master is an intelligent Italian, and the 
two or three stores and shops are conducted by 
them. There is a small Italian Catholic church, 
and a public school full of bright-eyed Italian 
children. 

Stretching out from the village are tiny 
farms of a few acres each, all well cultivated and 
with gardens and vineyards about the little 
houses. It is a very interesting settlement and 
points a way of adopting the Italians into our 
civilization without herding them in the tene- 
ments of cities. This village is builded where a 
few years ago were only level fields and trees 
and underbrush. 

Another nearby village, and one full of 
pleasant childhood associations for me, is a 
mile and a half distant, on the winding, park- 
like road leading toward the Palisades and the 
river. This is pre-Revolutionary and very 
quaint, attractive, and unspoiled. Here is our 
post office and the village churches, one of 
which my grandfather built and worshiped in 

49 



THE JOURNAL OF 

for many years. A beautiful hilly country lies 
all about, and among these hills are some fine 
estates, but much the same type of people live 
in the village as made their homes there of old, 
and that is a cause of rejoicing. It is so good to 
have a few unchanged spots, and here the 
changes have not been revolutionary, but 
merged into the quiet life of the people with- 
out transforming the village into a common- 
place, up-to-date small town. 

My immediate neighbors are the farmers 
living on the old places, in quaint, attractive 
homes where generations of their ancestors 
have lived and worked. Here and there Ger- 
man farmers or gardeners have taken the 
places of the old settlers, or a city family has 
come to the old-time region. No one is rich or 
anywhere near it, or likely to be, but there 
is an atmosphere about the places and in the 
few homes I have come to know that refreshes 
one, and speaks of peace and modest plenty, 
and of cheer and industry. Good roads and 
electric lighting and telephone service have 
slipped in quietly but not obtrusively, and one 
can go about with the feeling and reaHzation 
that the magic chain with the past is not 
broken. 

"Time, which changes all things, is but 

50 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

slow in its operations upon a Dutchman's 
dwelling," says Washington Irving, and his 
alluring picture of the quaint, low-eaved farm- 
houses of Nieuw Nederlands has a special charm 
if one has seen with his own eyes some of 
these picturesque survivals of the olden time. 

The solidity and picturesque simplicity of 
the Dutch colonial farmhouses account for the 
numerous survivals of this type of home ar- 
chitecture in regions where the growth of 
great cities has not leveled all landmarks of 
a former time. A restful beauty pervades 
these old Dutch farm and village houses, and 
in late years frequent copying of the best 
features of these homes of our forefathers 
evidences a reawakening of artistic feeling and 
a latter-day appreciation of the simple life. 

I like to think of the sterling virtues of the 
Hollanders who brought to a new country 
the courage, skill, industry, and love of order 
and beauty which had made their own land 
the center of European civilization. Their 
descendants might well imitate the filial loyalty 
of the New Englander and proclaim to the 
world the great and important part their Dutch 
forefathers had in the settlement of this coun- 
try and the founding of the government of the 
United States. 

SI 



THE JOURNAL OF 

Dutch settlement in the middle states of 
America occurred in the period of Holland's 
greatest eminence. "In every branch of hirnian 
industry," says Motley, "these republicans took 
the lead." And Thorold Rogers claims that 
the success of Holland's struggle for liberty 
was the beginning of modem civilization — "the 
Dutch having taught Europe nearly everything 
it knows." Her merchants controlled the com- 
merce of the world, the influence of her states- 
men and scholars was worldwide, and her broad 
tolerance made this small country the refuge 
of the oppressed and the persecuted of every 
land. At the same time her artists were painting 
immortal pictures, and her artist-craftsmen fash- 
ioning in silver and gold, in wood and clay and 
leather and textiles the beautiful things for 
use and adornment that served to make the 
home environment of the rich and the poor 
artistic. 

The institutions and civilization of Holland 
left a permanent impress upon the New World 
of which too little acknowledgment has been 
made. It is rarely that the Dutch blood in 
American veins is given its due share of credit 
for the sterling traits and aesthetic qualities 
of the American people. New England has 
wisely and zealously investigated, preserved, 

52 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

and published to the world every trace of her 
colonial history from archives, historic spots, 
architectural remains, ancient furniture and 
utensils, and manners and customs, with the 
influences that shaped her founding, and those 
that went out from her in the shaping of the 
nation. It is only in recent years that an 
effort to rehabilitate the early history of the 
middle states has seriously begun, although 
Woodrow Wilson has made bold to say that 
"the local history of the middle states is much 
more structurally a part of the nation as a 
whole than is the history of New England or 
of the several states and regions of the South.'* 
The Hollanders were the first people to make 
home life comfortable, as we imderstand it, and 
they brought to the New World their high 
ideal of home. What survivals of the early 
settlers and their descendants have come down 
to us in their houses, furniture, and utensils, 
and in their customs and personal belongings 
evidence the comfort and simplicity in which 
they lived, and their sense of the value of 
the picturesque and the beautiful in their homes 
and environment. They chose sightly loca- 
tions for their homes, on gently sloping hill- 
sides, or by the waterside, with a longing 
thought of the mother-land, and even the 

53 



THE JOURNAL OF 

simplest country houses were models of comfort 
and quaint homelikeness and excellent workman- 
ship, as of a people long past the rude begin- 
nings of pioneer life. The low substantial stone 
houses were picturesque, and into them went 
handwrought timbers and shingles and solid 
masonry. Within were immense fireplaces with 
Dutch hearth tiles, broad window seats, won- 
derful scenic wall paper, and the substantial 
furniture brought from Holland. The burnished 
metal utensils, the handwrought plate, and 
artistic Delft ware added the touch of bright- 
ness to the interior. The things they used in 
everyday life were artistic and of sound work- 
manship, so that to-day what survive of them 
is kept in museimis and chief rooms and copied 
diligently by a generation awakening to the 
value of beauty in the common life. 

The manor house and the larger town houses 
of the Dutch in America were examples of 
their more stately home architecture, and the 
interiors of these evidenced the richness of 
the finishing and furnishing of the time. Very 
few of these houses are left, the advancing tide 
of business and population having swept them 
away at a time when neither art nor historic 
remainders held a very high place in New 
World civilization. Richard Grant White says 

54 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

that "old New York has been swept out of 
existence by the great tidal wave of its own 
prosperity." 

But the country regions of certain sections 
of the middle states have many delightful old 
houses built by the descendants of the first 
Dutch settlers, who clung to their native 
architecture, native customs and manners, and 
to their mother tongue long after the British 
had taken possession of the machinery of 
government in the Dutch colonies. We find 
how deeply the Hollanders had taken root in 
the fact that the Dutch language was used in 
the Dutch Reformed churches of New York 
until 1764, a hundred years after the EngHsh 
conquest, when they reluctantly adopted the 
prevailing tongue, but Dutch was occasionally 
used until forty years later. In the coimtry 
districts the change to church services in 
English was still later. All the services in the 
Bergen church (now Jersey City) were in the 
Dutch language until 1792, and the singing 
continued in Dutch until 1809. The church 
register was kept in the same language until 
1809. The charming region north of "old 
Bergen" and of New York on both sides of 
the Hudson to Albany and beyond, was dotted 
with Dutch settlements which preserved their 

55 



THE JOURNAL OF 

original customs, language, and home life to 
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Dutch 
names predominate even now in large sections 
of this Hudson River region. 

Many of the Dutch colonial farm and village 
houses may still be found on Long Island, and 
scattered houses of this type on Staten Island, 
and in sections of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and 
New Jersey mark the extent of early Dutch 
settlements 

This region on the west shore of the Hudson, 
including Bergen County in New Jersey, and 
Rockland and Orange counties in New York, 
is perhaps richer than the others in well-pre- 
served Dutch colonial farmhouses and ancient 
Dutch village churches. Here, too, one finds 
something of the old-time atmosphere, and 
survivals of quaint Dutch customs. The rural 
environment in most of this region, the com- 
paratively homogeneous population, descendants 
of the early Dutch settlers, the ancient customs 
lingering even to the present, the time-worn 
gravestones and marvelous church records of 
two centuries and more make it possible to 
reconstruct in part amid these reminders a 
lively picture of farm life in Dutch colonial 
days. Some one has advised the student of 
architecture to go to Paris via Hackensack, 

S6 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

New Jersey, and it is certain one would carry 
away fair memories of fascinating old stone 
houses, substantial as when the stones were 
newly placed, and with all the simple picturesque 
beauty and comfort which the magic word 
"home" suggests. 

But here and all through the Hudson valley 
a new civilization is covering the old one. 
Ancient customs linger only in remote comers, 
or in modem revivals to enliven festive 
days. 

June Tenth. Some reminders of the an- 
cient household industries remain in the neigh- 
boring farmhouses, where an old loom or spin- 
ning wheel, a quilting frame or candle-molds 
may be found occasionally, and all of them have 
spreads and quilts and carpets and rugs coming 
down from the former days. In the Italian vil- 
lage a few women have the graceful arts of lace- 
making and embroidery, and some of the men 
keep their skill in carving wood and modeling. 
So it has seemed to me that a Httle center for 
arts and crafts in my country home may be a 
means of friendship and mutual helpfulness in 
the neighborhood as we come to know each 
other better. 

The rooms on the right of the long hall 
running through the Old Homestead used 

57 



THE JOURNAL OF 

to be known as the parlor and the back bed- 
room. I am now putting these to social uses 
and call them the studio and the crafts room; 
rather too ambitious names, and I may sensibly 
wind up by calling them the workshops. 

Yesterday I had an old-time rag-carpet loom 
set up in the crafts room. I found it in a middle 
Jersey ancient village, and it fits perfectly into 
the low-ceiled room of my ancestral home. I 
learned to weave "Colonial rugs," as we call 
them nowadays, in anticipation of coming 
sometime to the country where I should have 
time to indulge my taste for handicrafts. It is 
fascinating work and uses whatever artistic 
gifts one has for form and color adaptations. 
Now I see how I can use it among a little circle 
of country and village women to promote farm- 
house and village industries, as well as neigh- 
borhood social life. The cutting, sewing, dye- 
ing, and weaving of materials for rugs will 
appeal to the women as they gain skill, and will 
perhaps help them earn a few extra dollars, 
provided we get sale for our rugs. I set up 
also one of the small Barbour linen looms for 
weaving towels and bureau covers and strips 
for curtains and other uses. If we really do 
much weaving, I can readily find old women 
in the villages who will no doubt cut and sew 

58 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

beautifully the materials for the rugs, and so 
spread the interest and usefulness of the work. 
I find that hand-sewing is not a lost art in the 
country, and one well-lighted comer of the 
crafts room is for the fine art of hand-sewing, 
with a suitable table, and an old-time chest to 
hold the cloth and the garments in process of 
being made. Embroidery and lace-making will 
also have a fit place in the crafts room. This 
room opens into a smaller room back of it, which 
gives directly on a grass plat made by the 
angle of the house, and enclosed on two sides 
by the ivy-covered walls of the house. 
Inside and out it is delightful for work and as a 
social meeting place. 

The studio is a long, low-studded room with 
an immense fireplace laid in old Dutch tiles, 
and with a high, narrow wood mantel above it. 
There are two large front windows with deep 
window seats and two quaint little windows, 
high and narrow, on the fireplace side of the 
room, and with the same deep window seats, 
being cut through eighteen inches of stone 
wall. Hardwood floors had to be put down, 
but it was with a pang of regret that I saw 
the broad, century-and-a-half-old, hand-hewn 
timbers covered up. The old timbers and 
flooring are sound after all the passing genera- 

59 



THE JOURNAL OF 

tions, and tell of honest, well-seasoned lumber 
in our forefathers' building operations. 

I have put my old brass andirons and candle- 
sticks in the studio, and two antique mahogany 
oval tables which were in the house in my 
grandfather's time, and hung a few good pic- 
tures. The shelving on one side of the room 
is filled with all my books on painting and 
sculpture, on pottery, old china, pewter ware, 
old furniture, and the arts of gardening and 
farming. How I have longed to read these — 
that is, often to take a morning or evening to 
leaf through, read, and ruminate on the wisdom 
and beauty inside these attractive volumes. 
But the town gives you no time for such a revel 
in books. I have hurried through chapters here 
and there on subjects I needed to know about 
specially, but for real communion with these 
books I have been waiting until I got to the 
country. 

June Twelfth. Joy! It is too good to be 
true. I found a pair of grand, solemn, gentle 
oxen last week on a little mountain-side farm, 
and cajoled the kindly farmer to sell them to 
me. He had raised them and couldn't say 
enough about their usefulness, their great 
strength, and gentleness. But if he had said 
they were wild, capricious, gay creatures I 

60 



A COUNTRY WOINIAN 

would have bought them just the same. They 
are a part of the poetry and sentiment of this 
region. I remember very vividly the ox-team 
owned by the colored preacher on the moun- 
tain, which he brought occasionally to do the 
heavy work here in my grandfather's time. 
The sense of power and peace in those gentle 
creatures has been a refreshing memory. 

The poet Carducci, in his lines to The Ox, 
exquisitely expresses their characteristics and 
the modem feeling of the common bond be- 
tween man and his faithful helpers in winning 
sustenance from the earth: 

I love thee, gentle ox, since thou my heart 

With sense of peace and power dost mildly fill; 
Whether in free and fertile fields apart, 

Thou gazing standest, solemn, silent, still; 
Or when, content beneath the yoke to smart, 

Gravely man's task thou aidest to fulfill; 

Meeting with thy slow glance each offered ill. 
From thy wide, black and humid nostril steams 

Thy breath, and, like a hymn, resounds and dies 
Thy joyous lowing on the air serene; 
While mirrored broad and tranquil, forth there gleams 

From out the austere sweetness of thine eyes 
The meadow's silence all divine and green. 

Besides being another link with the past and 
teaching their lesson of repose and calmness 
amidst strenuous work, our team of oxen will 

6i 



THE JOURNAL OF 

be very useful, doing all the heavy hauling, 
and many of the hard tasks of the farm. They 
will haul wood from the wood lot, pull out 
stumps, haul stones and clay, and when needed 
do any kind of ordinary farm work. They are 
easy keepers and will graze in the woods, and 
drink out of the brook during much of the year. 

June Fourteenth. We are getting into the 
longest days of the year, and how wonderful 
they are! It is daylight before four in the 
morning and the bird chorus begins with the 
earliest dawn. By sunrise it is over, though 
birds here and there are twittering and singing 
solos. Darkness does not settle down until 
eight in the evening, and one has the sensation 
of living more in these long, bright days than 
in the shorter ones. 

I like to be out of doors by half-past five 
and drink in the dewy freshness of the early 
morning. It gives one a good start for the 
day, and it is really necessary on a farm to 
improve the shining hours of the summer time, 
the seedtime and harvest days, when every- 
thing is clamoring for care, and saying, "Tend 
us now or we perish." There is time for a little 
loafing in winter on the farm, but not in the 
other seasons. 

But O the joy of the work! And to work 

62 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

under such marvelous conditions and in such 
an environment! Unseen foices working with 
us, doing the lion's share, and the sky arching 
over us, bluer than any sea, its drifting clouds 
and morning and evening colors visions of 
beauty! The cool, scented air from which one 
breathes in health and vigor, the grassy fields 
and green trees and hedges, and blossoming 
shrubs and flowers, all are near as we work 
at the daily farm tasks. Our hearts sing with 
Dr. Van Dyke: 

"This is the gospel of labor, 

Ring it, ye bells of the kirk. 
The Lord of Love came down from above 

To live with the men who work. 
This is the rose he planted 

Here in the thorn-cursed soil; 
Heaven is blessed with perfect rest, 

But the blessing of earth is toil." 

George the Slav is one of the break-of-day 
workers and never has to be called. He has 
fed the cows and is nearly through milking 
when I appear on the scene. The boy helps 
him put the milk through the separator and 
measure the cream into the cans, which stand 
ready for the man from the stimmer hotel, four 
miles distant, who comes at seven daily for the 
cream and milk. I have also engaged to supply 

63 



THE JOURNAL OF 

eggs, poultry, and vegetables as the season 
progresses, and very fortunate we are to have 
a market at our gates. The same management 
owns a small city hotel and will take our farm 
products all the year, but we must send them 
to the station during the fall and winter. This 
is only a mile and a half distant, so it will not 
be difficult. The difficult part will be to have 
the work go on satisfactorily while we are 
away during three or four months of the win- 
ter. But I am not borrowing trouble, and will 
find a way to solve difficulties as they arise. 

Distribution of products is half the battle 
on the farm, as it is in the rest of the world, 
and it is only a happy chance and the dearth 
of dairies, and especially of Jersey dairies, 
small or large, in our vicinity which gives us 
such a convenient market. Now the problem 
will be to keep the cows and chickens and 
garden and fields up to the mark, for some rea- 
sonable regularity of supply must be assured. 

The fact that there are cows and chickens and 
fields and garden does not guarantee that there 
will be milk and cream and eggs and vegetables, 
at least with any regularity and continuance of 
quantity and quality. This is another reason 
why I rise early and why I plan and study and 
work at the problems of the little farm. Eternal 

64 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

vigilance is the price of milk and eggs and 
vegetables as well as of liberty, and on a farm 
you do not reap what you have not sown 
and tended and watched and worked over. 

A hen seems a very guileless and manageable 
being to the uninitiated, and a mine of wealth 
in her reputed egg-producing powers, but vig- 
orous mental and physical efforts are needed 
by her owner to win steady and abundant re- 
sults in eggs and chickens. My sturdy Nor- 
wegian egg-man who brought me the weekly 
supply in the city expressed it pretty correctly 
when he said that only one in a hundred per- 
sons makes a success of egg raising and chicken 
farming. 

It is simply that people have an idea that 
anyone can farm successfully, that things grow 
and produce with just ordinary day's work 
attention, than which there never was a greater 
mistake. Nature is too bountiful to be alto- 
gether defeated, and even careless and brainless 
culture of the soil and care of animals brings 
some results, but success and a generous living 
is in the application of intelligent, trained, and 
enthusiastic efforts to farming. In advising my 
young college friends to choose farming as a 
lifework — the God-ordained work for mankind 
■ — I discriminate, and advise only the specially 

65 



THE JOURNAL OF 

bright and energetic ones to take it up, the 
honor men. A mediocre man may earn a scanty 
Hving in law, medicine, the ministry, or other 
Hnes, but he could hardly worry a living out 
of the soil. Brains, energy, and insight must go 
to make the successful modern farmer. 

June Seventeenth. I am more and more 
impressed with what the national and State 
governments are doing for country life and 
farming. No one need lack for knowledge and 
the best methods in every line of agriculture, 
for from both these sources are continually is- 
sued the most helpful, enlightening, and ad- 
vanced methods, gleaned from our own and 
other countries, and sent broadcast as farmers* 
bulletins over the whole land simply for the 
asking. These bulletins are practical guides 
based on real experiences at the various agri- 
cultural experiment stations, or by practical 
and progressive farmers, and are simply in- 
valuable. I have been much helped in the 
planning and carrying out of my country home 
activities by a study of many of these farmers* 
bulletins, and one of them especially is my 
chief guide. It is Bulletin No. 242, issued by 
the Department of Agriculture, and called 'An 
Example of Model Farming." It tells the story 
of successful farming on a fifteen-acre farm, 

66 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

where thirty head of stock are kept, seventeen 
of which are cows in milk, and where all the 
"roughage" is raised for them on the little farm. 
When this journal seems an improbable tale of 
impossible doings, I hope the reader will send 
for the Bulletin and find out how much less I 
am able to accomplish than the owner of this 
model farm. For although the owner of the 
fifteen-acre farm is a clergyman with no pre- 
vious experience in farming, I am sure he must 
be a genius not to be approached by ordinary 
mortals, or else the care and culture of souls 
have given him the necessary training for suc- 
cess in the culture of land and the care of stock. 
I look for no such notable success as his, but by 
adopting his methods and with other helps from 
wise farmers and gardeners I hope to do fairly 
well. Long life, vigorous health and happiness 
are some of the fruits I hope to reap from my 
little farm, but the ordinary crops are highly 
essential, at least to my happiness. 

By the method I am pursuing, three acres of 
the farm will be kept in grass to be cut for hay, 
three acres in com, two of which will be allowed 
to matiire, and the third will be cut as a green 
fodder crop during the summer. A half acre 
each is sown to rye and to mixed oats and cow- 
peas for fodder crops, coming on at different 

67 



THE JOURNAL OF 

dates, so the cows and other stock will have a 
succession of green food from now on to the 
late fall, instead of pasturing. But I am saving 
an acre and a half, the old orchard lot, as a 
pasture and outdoor living room for them. In 
this day of outdoor living I would not have 
the heart to follow exactly the model farmer's 
plan, which is based on what the butter-making 
little kingdom of Denmark does, keeping the 
cows stabled all the year round. No, I shall 
keep the cows out of doors all day from May 
to November. I am sure they will be happier 
and healthier. The beautiful oxen and the 
horses and young calves are to go either in the 
wood lot or the pasture on Sundays and on 
many of the fine summer nights. I like to see 
the horses roll on the grass and get up and 
shake themselves and start on a brisk gallop 
around the field. They feel their freedom and 
come up to the gate presently, neighing and 
holding their heads over to be patted. The 
old orchard has eight or ten picturesque apple 
trees left in it, which afford delightful shade, 
and the broad brook in the wood lot makes 
that an ideal spot for the animals. The least 
we can do for trusting creatures who do so 
much for us is to give them living conditions 
to which they naturally belong, so far as we 

68 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

can. The green fodder is carried on the farm 
wagon morning and afternoon fresh cut, and 
thrown out to the cows in the pasture field. 
Besides this, in their stalls they are fed their 
mixed ration of grain well seasoned with salt 
in the early morning and evening. 

I am going to try an Irish plan of winter 
feeding. This is to cut up and boil turnips or 
cabbage and thicken with com meal or a 
mixed grain meal. For this I shall plant in 
late July a quarter acre of field turnips, and 
George the Slav has already set out a quarter 
acre of late cabbage. We also sowed some long 
rows of field beets, for these are valuable winter 
feed for cattle. This Irish ration, it seems to 
me, will take the place of silage very well and 
avoid the peculiar flavor of the milk which is 
often complained of in silage-fed cows. I shall 
need a vegetable cutter for this and it can be 
run by the little engine of the cream separator. 
And I shall have to build a root cellar, but we 
need that anyway to keep our winter potatoes, 
beets, onions, parsnips, carrots, and celery in. 

I have a treasure of an Irish girl as a cook 
and houseworker. She came to me two months 
ago, after George, my colored houseman, and I 
were pretty tired out with our varied labors in 
getting settled, doing the cooking, and taking 

69 



THE JOURNAL OF 

care of the house, with only temporary help of 
workers by the day. George was not complain- 
ing, but he looked very sober, and as if he 
doubted the joys of country life, while with 
my necessary outdoor duties added to indoor 
ones, I was obliged to give up my daily stint of 
reading and writing and other accustomed if 
unnecessary pleasures or duties, when sud- 
denly Rose Finnegan dawned on my vision, 
coming from a friendly office where I had left 
instructions as to my needs. The more ac- 
complished ones declined to come to the coun- 
try, but Rose, being fresh from her mother's 
farm in Ireland, and a little homesick after a 
week of bewilderment in the great city with a 
married cousin, was rejoiced that she could 
find a place in the country. 

She had never lived out, but assisted her 
mother in the house and farm work, so she 
knows all about outdoor work and a little 
about housework. I have succeeded in teach- 
ing her to do plain cooking after our fashion, 
for she is very eager to learn, and her constant 
"Thank you, ma'ams" and exclamations of high 
appreciation of my ways of doing things have 
spurred me to a task I had always vowed not 
to undertake. However, Rose is no common 
Irish greenhorn, but a well-mannered and in- 

70 








WILD CARROTS NEAR THE WOODLOT. BRINGING IN OUR LAST LOAD OF HAY 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

telligent girl, coming from the small farmer 
class. She has a fair education, a rich Irish 
brogue, a love of work almost unbelievable, 
and a cheery disposition. She is trusty and 
interested in our welfare and determined to 
remain with us as long as she stays in Amer- 
ica, which I understand is to be until she has 
added a considerable sirni to what she calls 
her fortune in Ireland. I am enjoying her im- 
mensely, in spite of the burdens and mishaps in- 
cident to her training, and I feel that Providence 
has been kind to send me such a helper. She 
has no prejudices against the Negroes, as her 
compatriots in this country have, so that she 
and George the houseman sit down comfort- 
ably to their meals together and are very 
friendly. George the Slav and the farm boy 
take their meals together at much earlier hours. 
June Twenty-second. In the very thick of 
things. The harvest of hay is under way, the 
berry and jelly -making season is on, the garden 
calls daily for hours of work, in addition to the 
usual care for the field crops and the stock. I 
forgot to say we put in a half acre of potatoes, 
and after constant culture and daily battles 
with the potato bugs, they are coming on 
finely. For another fortnight they must have 
the cultivator run through them once or twice 

71 



THE JOURNAL OF 

a week, and then they will be vigorous enough 
to fight their few remaining foes alone. The 
oxen have behaved like angels, and already show 
how useful as well as ornamental they can be, 
and all the other creatures are cooperating in 
the general scheme of things most beautifully. 
We are fairly rioting in fresh vegetables and 
small fruits, and sending the surplus, which 
isn't large this year, to our stimmer hotel 
market. The strawberries we pick carefully 
with inch long stems so that they may be 
eaten from the stem. Three or four of them 
make a reasonable meal. 

Amelia and Angelica come home from col- 
lege in a few days, and they will be two royal 
helpers in and out of doors. Later two or three 
of their college friends are coming for a week- 
end visit, and some of our city friends we are 
asking for short visits, the ones who have been 
obliged to stay most or all of the summer in 
town. We are to go on living very simply when 
guests are here, letting them fit into our happy 
and busy life, and getting refreshment and 
stimulus from renewed association with them. 

June Twenty-ninth. These are busy 
days. It is the height of the season in the 
country, but in a different sense from the 
city's "season." We are in the midst of har- 

72 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

vest. We are also in the midst of ripe and 
ripening strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, 
currants, and cherries. Amelia and Angelica 
came from college a few days ago with trunks 
and boxes, and college banners and photo- 
graphs, and each brought a girl friend for a 
few days' stay. 

After the general rejoicing and unpacking, 
and a survey of the new home in the Old 
Homestead, we held a council of work. System 
and order, I find, are quite as important on the 
farm as in the office or shop or school, for even 
a small farm combines various lines of ac- 
tivity, as home management and work, tilling 
of the soil, care of stock, garden culture, and 
many other things. It is a factory, in a sense, 
where the raw material is worked over once or 
twice at least. More than that, the raw ma- 
terial is created on the farm. It is as near a 
case of something out of nothing as I know. 
From a field as bare as your hand four months 
ago, George the Slav and the boy have gar- 
nered into the bam several goodly loads of oats, 
and three or four loads of hay from the small 
hayfield, and two loads of rye from the low 
piece of land near the wood lot. These grains 
will shortly be threshed out with the small 
second-hand thresher which I have lately in- 

73 



THE JOURNAL OF 

stalled in the bam, and then ground up for 
feed for the horses and cows, leaving the straw 
as bedding for the animals. 

I have put a three-horse power engine into 
the bam to grind the com and other grains 
and to cut the cornstalks for winter fodder. 
With this and the separator engine much of 
the work of the farm and house can be done 
quickly and cheaply, which formerly had to 
be done expensively by hand or sent to the 
mill at the cost of time and toll. All our wood 
will be sawed by power from the larger engine, 
and the smaller one will do the laundry work 
for the family, or the hardest part of it, also 
the churning. 

But to come back to the council of work 
with my two college girls. Amelia was bom 
to be a private secretary and makes an ador- 
able one. She will take over all household and 
farm accounts for the summer, also the milk 
records, and will have charge of the farm and 
household stores, renewing as needed, and 
making the daily or weekly memoranda of 
things required. She will assist me in super- 
vising the dairy, for no ordinary farm hands or 
even extraordinary ones can be left to their own 
devices in this day of germs and certified milk. 

Angelica is a superior house manager for her 

74 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

years and loves the genial, unceasing, and repe- 
titious duties of the home. She will take 
charge of the household comfort and look after 
the needs of guests and make up the daily- 
menus. She will also supervise the garden and 
the fruit-gathering, and help in the canning, 
jellying, and preserving of the abundant sup- 
plies of fruit. Rose will be her loyal assistant, 
and George the houseman is often able to lend 
a hand at extra work, being a good cook and 
handy about all housework. Fortunately, in 
his own department George needs little super- 
vision, but goes on his noiseless and useful way 
in a daily routine which leaves the house clean, 
quiet, cool, and inviting after his accustomed 
touch has passed over it. I have come to re- 
spect the even tenor of his way, and only 
interrupt his schedule when necessity compels. 
His chief pleasiu-e is in the coming of guests; 
not from mercenary motives either, for he feels 
himself a part of the family and above accepting 
gratuities except when offered as gifts of friend- 
ship. He fairly loves to open the door to new 
or old friends of the family, help off their 
coats and wraps, escort them and their luggage 
to the guests' quarters, and wait at table 
where nice extra dishes honor the presence of 
the welcome guest. 

75 



THE JOURNAL OF 

One can overlook some shortcomings when 
this spirit of hospitality animates the serving 
members of the household. 

July Second. Everything is moving on 
wonderfully well. The work is so nicely dis- 
tributed according to tastes and abilities that 
none of us feels overburdened, although this is 
the rush season in the country. The days are 
so long and hot that we send a lunch to the 
men at the out-of-door work about half-past 
ten in the morning and a cooling drink of 
lemonade or buttermilk, so they come in at 
noon less exhausted and overhungry. 

We have adopted the good old-time noon- 
day dinner hour, and a siesta for man and 
beast of an hour or two after dinner, which 
does away with the best excuse for a late 
dinner. 

My lord and master has his long vacation 
now, so falls easily into the way of a country 
dinner time. The council of work assigned 
him the wood lot as his share in the farm 
work, knowing his fondness for forestry. And 
here for three or four hours daily he uses ax 
and saw and rake in making our little forest 
more beautiful and useful. We notice master 
and men, equally, wend homeward with some 
eagerness when the tuneful farm bell sounds 

76 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

the quarter before twelve hour, and by the 
appetites of all the family I conclude that per- 
haps the noon hour is not a bad time for dining, 
but only an inconvenient and unfashionable one 
for city folks in their tiresome duties of doc- 
toring, lawyering, teaching, buying, and selling. 

We have tea at five o'clock under the 
big walnut tree on the lawn, with everyone free 
to come or not; and quite often a neighbor 
comes in at this restful hour. At seven-thirty 
we have high tea, or supper, on the screened 
dining-room porch which faces the road. It is 
lighted with Japanese lanterns at this early 
twilight hour, and with the fragrance of flowers 
and the cool evening air is most attractive. 

This gives us the beautiful hour of early 
evening for walking in the garden, lawn, or 
woods, or reading out of doors, and when the 
summer night begins to fall we gather for the 
social hour, at the evening meal, not a hot, 
heavy supper, but dainty and cooling, yet 
satisfying and substantial. 

At night you can do nothing in the country 
but sit out of doors and watch the alluring 
moon and friendly stars, following the lights 
and shadows among the trees and on the 
roadway and fields. If you have been faithful, 
you are too tired to read long or talk much, 

77 



THE JOURNAL OF 

and are ready, but for the exceeding beauty of 
the night, to He down to the sleep of the dili- 
gent. That sleep is so much a forgetting, an 
absolute dreamless unconsciousness, that you do 
not know you have been asleep. You remember 
only shutting your eyes to the beauty of the 
night. All else is a blank until the dawn of a 
new day, in which to work at what Thomas 
Jefferson called the pursuit of kings, beams in 
at your windows. 

It is a perfectly sane way to live — this busy 
country life, and I am more than ever in love 
with it. The hard work makes me sure it is 
the right way to live. "In the sweat of thy 
brow" has a deep meaning now as in the be- 
ginning. I am suspicious of living which in- 
volves no physical labor. This is needed for 
welfare of mind and soul, as well as for health 
and long life. 

July Fourth. Fireworks are under the ban 
here. If we are to bring to the country the 
noise and waste of city life, we are unworthy to 
dwell here. I don't want the oxen disturbed 
out of their peaceful calm by nerve-racking 
firecrackers. I respect the temperament of my 
faithful domestic animals. The cows would 
fall off in their milk with an ordinary Fourth of 
July celebration, and the horses be nervous for 

78 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

a week. We will celebrate joyfully with a 
neighborhood party to-night, and some city- 
bound men will come out to meet the college 
girls. This morning we are to get together an 
hour or two to read and talk about Dutch in- 
fluences in the making of our government. We 
will lunch in the woods, and dine at the Inn 
where we send the cream daily, and be home 
for the festivities at eight-thirty this evening. 

July Twelfth. One blessing of the country 
is that there is work here, physical toil, and of 
the most agreeable and inspiring kind to peo- 
ple with souls. There is never help enough, 
and always something is crying to be done, so 
that the veriest idler becomes perforce a 
worker unless he is hopelessly degenerate. 
And there is health in it, salvation of body 
and soul. One of the things the Almighty seems 
to have kept from the wise and the prudent 
is the absolute necessity of physical work 
for the sanity of body and mind. So a multi- 
tude of invaluable lives go out before their 
time, and a greater multitude are wrecks 
for lack of this great essential. Another class 
on the wrong road are the millions who 
grind away at forbidding tasks in vitiated air 
and with monotonous routine. We need won- 
der little at the idlers and tramps and in- 

79 



THE JOURNAL OF 

capables who hang on the skirts of society, a 
dead weight. The appalHng monotony of 
much modern work may well drive average 
folk to idleness or insanity. 

The joy of work we are interested in and 
which is varied and stimulating cannot be 
overestimated. It develops the best in us. 
When men and women owned their own tools 
and wrought on looms or forges, or in other 
handicraft ways, putting their best thought 
and some artistic taste and skill into the prod- 
uct, the joy of work came out in the grace and 
beauty of the design and execution, and in its 
durability. 

Greater health and happiness is in outdoor 
rather than indoor work, for here we have 
the wonderful accompaniments of sky and 
atmosphere, of fields and woods and flowers, 
and bird and beast neighbors are never far off. 

A few million more of our people ought to 
be tilling the soil — we should have a happier 
and healthier population and fewer tramps 
and idlers. 

The delight in outdoor life and the finer and 
truer feeling for nature are a precious part of 
the gain of modern life. Work under the open 
sky and in the sweet-smelling earth or the 
softly-talking woods, or with the creatures 

80 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

which Kve among these, is full of healing as 
well as of inspiration. "Speak to the earth 
and it shall teach thee," the Good Book says to 
us, and surely never were lessons more subtly 
instilled. It is passing strange that so few 
physicians prescribe work in the ground as a 
cure, although they have long sent their pa- 
tients to the outdoor life. Health and vigor of 
body and mind and renewal of spirit are to be 
found by entering into working relations with 
good mother earth. And for that large and 
growing class of people who keenly realize the 
conditions of toil or deprivation under which the 
masses of the world live and struggle, there is 
satisfaction in vacation weeks and months 
wherein one renders service to the common 
life and makes two blades of grass grow where 
only one grew before. Our contribution may be 
small, but it is toward the common good, and 
through it we get close to realities. There is 
a delicious lonesomeness when one works in 
the open air, and feels the nearness and grati- 
tude of graceful plants which before our touch 
were choking with weeds. 

The odors of the earth and of the green and 
growing things minister to health and satis- 
faction. The too little loved sky waits above 
us in serene glory when our task permits an 

8i 



THE JOURNAL OF 

upward glance. There is harmony in working 
among the green things of the earth, for plants 
are purposeful, bent on a kindly mission to 
mankind. They take their work and play 
together in sunshine, wind, and rain, and why 
may not we find health, beauty, and peace 
while we serve the world? Emerson tells us 
that "the greatest delight which the fields and 
woods minister is the suggestion of an occult 
relation between man and the vegetable. I am 
not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to 
me, and I to them." 

Perhaps the royal road to mother earth's 
work cure is through the woods. The woods 
minister to more subtle needs than the fields 
and gardens. They temper the atmosphere 
and bring down the rains, and afford shelter 
and herbage for the cattle, and by and by they 
go to make the four walls of home, and enter 
into the thousand practical uses of life. How- 
ever, com and wheat make brain and brawn, 
so no invidious distinctions may be drawn. 

The joy of the woods, however, is surely the 
ultimate healing power of good Mother Earth. 
"In the woods," says Emerson, "a man casts 
off his years. In the woods is perpetual youth. 
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us 
to live with them, and quit our life of solemn 

82 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

trifles. As water to our thirst, so is the rock, 
the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet — 
what health, what affinity!" 

The woods I know best are not the lonesome 
forests of great trees and dense shadows. The 
poet may find "pleasure in the pathless woods," 
but the everyday htiman wants the cheerier 
woods, where broad spaces of sunlight make 
patches of green grass to thrive, and a carpet 
of many hued fiowers is spread for our feet. 
Never such a wood without its brook and 
springs! In our woods there is a clear pool 
fed by springs and flowing out to make the 
brook, which in the driest, hottest seasons 
never runs dry. Nothing can be more de- 
lightful than clearing this brook of sedges and 
grasses, and drifts of clay and pebbles which 
choke up its channel. 

The delight of outdoor work gets hold of 
me so strongly sometimes, when my hands are 
grimy, my back lame, and my head and heart 
intoxicated with sweet odors of the earth, the 
grasses and flowers, and overwhelmed by the 
marvelous bounty of the Creator for man's 
comfort and health, that I long to open a 
country colonizing office in town for enlight- 
ening city dwellers as to the real joy and profit 
of living near to nature's heart. Especially 

83 



THE JOURNAL OF 

would I like to make something of this plain 
to the toilers whose poverty and hard work 
leave them no time to consider a new and 
better way of life. 

July Seventeenth. The days are intensely 
hot, and one fairly sees the corn growing taller 
and waving its long green leaves and silken 
tassels triumphantly in the summer breezes. 
Com is to the Eastern what wheat is to the 
Western farmer — the main and indispensable 
crop. As the Minnesota and Dakota farmers 
talk in terms of wheat — wheat weather, wheat 
conditions, and wheat prices — so our Easterners 
talk and meditate and almost pray in terms 
of com. A big corn crop means prosperity. 
These moist, hot days insure big ears of yellow 
corn and heavy fodder from the stalks. Every- 
thing else flourishes too under these tropical 
conditions, but all are incidental to corn, which 
is a universal food and almost as good a medium 
of exchange as gold. 

The horses sniff and neigh for very gladness 
when the golden ears are rolling into their 
feed boxes; the cows straightway increase their 
milk yield when the yellow cornmeal is mixed 
bountifully with their mess; corn-fattened pigs 
are the only fit ones for the market place, and 
it is the mainstay of chickens in their efforts to 

84 
















*f 




•1 ifi ini! , 



v^ '^"^ 






f 



THE OLDEST HOUSES IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

provide a wholesome breakfast for the world. 
As for us humans, com feeds us directly as well 
as indirectly in many forms. 

To-day George the Slav brought in two or 
three well-grown though immature ears of 
com and held them up for our admiring eyes. 
They certainly give promise of a record crop 
if weather conditions remain favorable. George 
takes most of the credit to himself and deserves 
a good deal, for successful com means diligence 
in business. 

July Twenty-first. There is great rejoic- 
ing, for one of my intimate friends has rented 
the oldest house in the neighborhood for a 
simimer home. It was built about 1700 and has 
a glorious, deep fireplace and a well of water 
fit for the gods. My friend, Martha by name, 
writes poetry and prose, and this Is a place in 
which to see visions and dream dreams. She 
has taken the quaint old place for three years 
and will make it comfortable and attractive 
with a little effort and expense. Angelica and 
Amelia are helping her renovate and settle it 
and astonish me daily with tales of wonders 
accomplished. It will be such a happiness to 
have our circle increased by this congenial 
friend, who will mix into the neighborhood as 
happily as we have. We celebrated by asking 

85 



THE JOURNAL OF 

a few neighbors to meet her at a picnic on the 
Palisades, all of us going on foot from choice, 
by way of the mountain boulevard after a 
climb to that delectable road. George the 
houseman came after in dignified state with a 
wagon and the provisions. It was a heavenly 
day and bound us all together in joyful appre- 
ciation of each other and of our happy fate to 
live among the glories and graces of kindly 
nature. The day's success was due to Martha 
chiefly, to her charm and her joy in finding the 
true life. She will stay late in the country and 
come back early, and I doubt not songs in 
the night will be hers and day dreams to weave 
into verses for those who must take their joy 
in nature second-hand. 

July Twenty-seventh. We begin to know 
people for five miles round about. The min- 
ister of the little village church — my grand- 
father's church, for he built and mostly main- 
tained it for fifty years — was, of course, one of 
our first friends. Then we found an ideal 
country doctor who cures mostly by suggestion, 
with incidental prescriptions of baths, exercise, 
and much sleep. He became at once a valued 
friend of the family, but with the assurance that 
we were hopelessly well and his calls would 
need to be friendly visits. 

86 




PARLOR CUPBOARD OF AN OLD DUTCH FARMHOUSE IN THE NEARBY VILLAGE. 
A REAL HOLLAND INTERIOR 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

Then our immediate neighbors have proved 
so satisfying. They welcomed us, and were 
delighted to find an open door at our home, 
where a thought for the general weal of the 
community was taken and some practical 
way opened for them to come into social and 
personal contact with one another a little 
more freely. The arts and crafts rooms are a 
meeting place of unending interest, and a rea- 
son for frequent and prolonged comings of 
neighbors, assured that here is a welcome and 
work for those who wish, and fellowship of 
kindred minds. 

I am weaving some rag carpet rugs in at- 
tractive patterns, and Amelia is also an adept 
at the loom. One of our oldest neighbors has 
revived her skill at coloring cloth in vegetable 
dyes, and such wonderfully soft and artistic 
and lasting blues and greens and browns and 
purples as she brings out of the dye pot delight 
our eyes and insure the beauty of our rugs. 
Amelia is teaching two neighbors, young mar- 
ried women, to weave, and three or four older 
women sew the carpet rags at their homes, using 
much of the artistic dyed cloth with their own 
pieces, and bringing them in pound balls, on 
our social afternoons, as their contribution to 
the neighborhood arts and crafts work. We are 

87 



THE JOURNAL OF 

working at other crafts a little, and talking 
over plans to make our work profitable, and so 
to extend our art industries. The winter will 
be the season to work out the problems of the 
social and crafts side of our lives. Now the 
wonderful outdoor world claims us most of the 
time, and we visit each other's gardens, and 
inspect the cows and other animals, and go on 
picnic excursions or on fishing parties in the 
little leisure of our busy days. 

July Thirty-first. I pitched my camp near 
the site of the little old red house of my child- 
hood days. Here by the spring, under the 
shade mellowed by sunlight, we had two tents 
put up on good solid floors — oblong tents, 
which seemed like little cottages, with their 
flapping doors of canvas. Good couches and 
just furnishings enough to make a temporary 
home for two or three people, and my camp was 
done, for Dame Nature had made the setting 
more beautiful than hand of man could ever 
work out, and we have only to accept her gift. 

Most people, including my lord and master, 
naturally thought we were sufficiently ruralized 
without going into camp. But a country home 
is a place of such varied activities and interests 
and incoming and outgoing people that I knew 
full well there would be joy in a tented retreat 

88 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

under the starry skies and with delicious sounds 
from brook and trees the only noises; hence my 
camp. It has been and promises to be an end- 
less source of peace and pleasure. I can lie 
on my couch and watch the stars in their courses, 
and wave a greeting to the man in the moon. 
Or in these hot, busy days, a long siesta far 
from the house and its inevitable duties, is 
restful beyond words. 

Another use I intend for the camp is to 
offer it a week at a time, now and then, to 
people who never get into the country and 
who need it sadly. A young clergyman and 
his wife, from a small downtown church, are 
coming next week to enjoy it, and later two 
or three clerks who never know how to get a 
little rest and pleasure from their brief vaca- 
tion; from here they can go on day outings to 
lovely spots and at night be refreshed by 
sleeping practically out of doors. 

August Third. To-day we had sweet corn 
from the garden for dinner, and will have a 
lettuce and cauliflower salad for supper. The 
lima beans are coming on, while the early cab- 
bages and white turnips we are using right 
along, as well as string beans and beets. Har- 
vest apples and old-fashioned bell pears are 
the chief fruits, now that the berry season is 

89 



THE JOURNAL OF 

over. But I must not forget the huckleberries 
which sturdy boys and girls gather on the 
mountainside and bring to our door two or 
three times a week. If there is anything better 
than huckleberry pie in the pie line, I have 
yet to discover it. Angelica is canning a lot of 
the berries for winter use. 

The wonder of it all is this succession of 
fruits and vegetables, each month furnishing 
new and delicious kinds, beginning with spinach 
and asparagus in early spring and running 
through until late fall. Then for fear man 
might suffer lack in the long winter months, 
certain vegetables and fruits are good keepers, 
and being stored in a suitable place they give 
fresh food all winter. 

When you live and work in the country it 
is so easy to believe that God planted a garden 
for man's sustenance and delight, and so im- 
possible to comprehend the attitude of people 
who think all these wonderful laws and bounti- 
ful provisions of nature come by chance or 
without a lawgiver and creator. 

August Fourth. I worked in the garden an 
hour before breakfast this morning, which I 
try to do three or four days in the week for 
the garden's sake and my own. It is so still 
and sweet and dewy there at six o'clock. The 

90 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

earth is like our friends, the more we cultivate 
it the closer and more delightful our relations 
become. It leaves no kindnesses unretumed. 
It heaps favors on us after its own kind and its 
silences speak to the comprehending heart. 

One feels like continually singing praises in 
the garden, the fields, and woods, and under 
the open sky, and since the foundation of the 
world men have sung praises and uttered 
thanksgiving for the marvelous bounty of the 
earth. The Psalmist seems to confirm our in- 
timations that even inanimate nature is full of 
joy and praises when he sings: "Let the field 
be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall 
all the trees of the wood rejoice." 

I cut a basket of flowers before going in to 
breakfast, and so closes one of the happiest 
hours of the day. It is health-giving too, that 
early morning hour of sunshine and fragrance 
and contact with the earth and her fruits. 
Things seem clear and easy in the strength of 
the new day which were perplexing and worri- 
some the night before. I think it might be a 
cure for nervous people, an early hour in the 
garden, only, poor souls, they never seem to 
have the will and energy to get up early, even 
though their chief trouble is sleeplessness. 
Keeping well is my particular hobby, for obser- 

91 



THE JOURNAL OF 

vation has convinced me it is far easier than 
getting oneself mended after a breakdown. 

August Fifth. This was our picnic day. 
We have one every week, generally on Sat- 
urday afternoons. We cook our supper in 
the open and stay late to enjoy the moon- 
light when the moon shines, and the friendly 
and more constant stars. Sometimes we go 
to the top of the Palisades, sometimes to the 
foot of that mighty bulwark, beside the broad 
river, but very often to our camp near the 
spring or to a neighboring woods. 

The coffee-pot and broiler and a pot to 
boil potatoes with the skins on are the im- 
portant features of the outfit. The provisions 
have to be bountiful, for out-of-door appetites 
are remarkable. George the houseman always 
goes with us as chief fireman and helper, and 
two of the party cook and serve the supper. 
Our poet friend Martha goes with us and one 
or two neighbors, and whoever chance to be 
our guests for the week end. So we have 
simply happy, witching hours of talk and song 
and jollity until the darkness begins to gather 
thick and the stars come out while we sit 
around the glowing fire and fall into the quiet 
mood that seems to fit the evening hour and the 
close of the working week. 

92 




THE TOP or THE PALISADES 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

August Sixth. It is one of those Sunday 
mornings when the whole earth seems to be 
uttering forth the glory of the visible and 
the invisible, when to be alive is a joy. Cloud- 
less blue sky overarches the green and bloom- 
ing earth. The atmosphere is clear and vibrant. 
A heavenly peace seems brooding over every- 
thing as in the time before man toiled and 
moiled to keep body and spirit together. 

Sunday in the country is the crown of living. 
The stillness is a revelation. The busy grind 
of everyday life ceases, except just the neces- 
sary work, and men and animals have a quiet, 
restful air, different from their weekday look. 

We all go to church in the morning and 
our guests with us. Our ancestors hereabouts, 
the genial Dutch folks, went piously to church 
services lasting most of the day. They took a 
lunch, and in winter a foot stove, and were 
edified by lengthy prayers and sermons, and 
cheered by the neighborly intercoiu"se at noon- 
time. The spiritual side of life is as conscious 
in us as in them, and perhaps as dominant, 
although we have changed our customs of 
churchgoing to shorter hours and shorter ser- 
mons and prayers. 

Churchgoing in the country is far less regular 
than of old, and the influence of the church 

93 



THE JOURNAL OF 

less. Perhaps it is because there are so many 
open doors to the spiritual life nowadays. It is 
just as true of the cities, and perplexes thought- 
ful and religious people everywhere. But if we 
try to solve all the problems and remedy all 
the ills of modem life, we shall not have time 
to till the soil or keep house. We try, indeed, 
to do our share in the effort to understand 
conditions and help bring in the kingdom. 
Here in the country I haven't got much farther 
than just to do, myself, and try to have my 
family do, what we think is right and best for 
us, to set an example of going ourselves regu- 
larly to church and inviting our neighbors when 
a suitable opportunity occurs. We take the 
same attitude so far in community social and 
political affairs, which suffer just as the church 
does for lack of the people's cooperation. 

August Fifteenth. This is the farmer's 
vacation time, a little cessation of urgent 
work, an interval between the gathering of 
early and later crops. One almost has the 
sensation of a real vacation. There is still 
enough to do in the care of stock and other 
regular work, but now we can have the men a 
few hours daily for such extra things as have 
waited for this time of comparative leisure. 
I am having them set out some evergreens as 

94 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

a windbreak on the north side of the barn, 
and small clumps of them in two or three 
other places. I don't want many, for they 
seem not to belong to this old-time place. 
The fences are being looked after a little, the 
spring cleaned out, and wood brought from 
the wood lot, where the foresting has gone on 
these weeks past. 

It is such a satisfaction to be partially in- 
dependent of the coal trust, and we look for- 
ward to the early autumn evenings when the 
open fireplaces with our own wood will cheer 
and warm us. We put in a kitchen range 
which bums both coal and wood, and a fur- 
nace of the same kind. The latter easily takes 
cordwood sawed in two pieces. Wood gives 
out a delicious, odorous warmth, and the food 
cooked over wood fires has a different and 
finer flavor. 

August Twenty-first. Angelica has made 
so much jelly and jam and canned such a quan- 
tity of fruit with the combined help of the 
family that we had to put up a new fruit shelf 
in the cellar room devoted to food. The fruit 
looks beautiful and samples of each kind at 
our porch suppers proclaimed them perfect. 

Angelica is becoming a notable housekeeper, 
and I have to warn some of our guests that she 

95 



THE JOURNAL OF 

has three years yet in college. Several ro- 
mances have been weaving themselves during 
the simimer, as is inevitable where young 
people are coming and going. What a 
blind thing it is, this meeting and wooing 
and wedding! It is not only Cupid who is 
blind, but the young people most intimately 
concerned in the romances. The best safe- 
guards for reasonable happiness in the natural 
ending which some of these romances are sure 
to have is that youth should be trained to 
unselfishness, self-control, self-rehance, and in- 
dustry. 

Just now I am thinking pretty seriously on 
these questions, for something really tragic is 
going on under our very eyes, and one's power- 
lessness to help is so apparent. In crises of life 
very little help outside oiu-selves is possible. 
We stand alone. No one can decide for us. 

The little tragedy which has shadowed our 
gayest and busiest days a bit concerns a charm- 
ing young girl, one of Amelia's earliest and 
closest friends, and a great favorite with us all, 
who came out to us in a gale of trouble three 
weeks ago. The child has been educated in 
fashionable schools and has all the graces and 
accomplishments. Usually she is the merriest 
of them all, dancing, singing, walking, and 

96 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

talking as care-free and happy as the birds on 
the wing. Her home for years has been with 
distant relatives in the city, where she is en- 
tirely one of the family and where she has 
shared all the advantages of education and 
accomplishments enjoyed by her young relatives, 
although her patrimony is very small. 

She is a dear and attractive girl, and quite 
naturally the eldest son of the family fell in 
love with her. No sudden thing, to be sure, 
but by constant association at home, and con- 
tinual choosing of Cornelia to take everywhere 
to their young circle's entertainments, and to 
confide all his hopes and ambitions to, there 
has grown up one of those devoted compan- 
ionships which are the surest presage of a 
happy future together. There was no formal 
engagement announced, but everyone knew 
they were bound up in each other. 

In an unfortunate moment Cornelia over- 
heard Raymond's parents regretting that their 
eldest and very promising son should not 
marry a yoimg woman with some fortune. 
The poor innocent folks are wealthy themselves 
and have a large family and know how handily 
money comes in to oil the wheels of material 
existence. It was only a little human regret, 
and with no intention of interfering with their 

97 



THE JOURNAL OF 

son's happiness. But this high-strung young 
piece renounced her lover forthwith, and fled 
to find balm in the peaceful country and with 
old friends, leaving a man stunned and heart- 
sick over her folly and pride, protesting with 
all his soul against the cruelty of making him 
the victim of some chance words and innocent 
regrets. 

September Fifth. Few hints as yet of real 
autimm, but the fullness of simimer every- 
where. The ripened com awaits the sickle and 
the apple trees hang loaded with red-cheeked 
apples, soon to be picked and stored for winter 
use. 

The fields are only a shade less richly green 
than in July, and the woods are but just be- 
ginning to put on the yellows and browns and 
soft reds of autumn. The busy season has 
commenced again on the farm, for now the 
com must be cut, and later husked and the 
stalks stacked. Apples and pears are being 
picked and sorted. The potatoes were dug 
this week and turned out well, smooth, and good 
sized. We will store enough for the year, until 
the next crop ripens, and have fifty bushels to 
sell, and thirty bushels of very small ones to 
feed to the chickens and pigs. For this purpose 
we boil them in a big iron pot, generally out of 

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A COUNTRY WOMAN 

doors, and stir in several quarts of wheat bran 
or cracked com or commeal. The fowls re- 
joice in this tasteful mixture, and the pigs are 
vociferous over it. This is what Irish Rose 
calls "stir-about," and a much-used feed in old 
Ireland. Then the chickens like cabbages very- 
much, and the poorer heads from our small 
field will be stored separately, under a bank of 
straw and earth to keep for use in feeding them 
during the winter. Fasten one on a nail or 
hook within their reach and an eager crowd 
gathers around and picks the tender white 
cabbage heart out in short meter. 

I haven't spoken of our chickens and pigs 
before, on the theory of leaving the best to the 
last. The chickens are a dream. Thoroughbred 
black Minorcas, Rhode Island reds, and barred 
Plymouth Rocks; too many varieties for a 
small place, I admit. But we got them in our 
inexperience, and now are too attached to each 
kind to give any of them up. They are all so 
excellent and beautiftd, each kind with its 
dominant virtues, and seeming to outvie each 
other in the number and size of the eggs they 
lay. Without undue favoritism, I may men- 
tion the beauty and lordly airs of the black 
Minorca cocks, and the immensity and white- 
ness of the Minorca hen's eggs. They never 

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THE JOURNAL OF 

stop to hatch out and bring up a family, but 
keep right on laying as if they realized the con- 
suming power of the human family for fresh- 
laid eggs. 

September Thirteenth. I do not believe 
much in unlucky nimibers and days, but cer- 
tainly this day bears out the reputation of the 
number thirteen. Not that ill luck has befallen 
the farm or its interests. No, all things work 
together for those who love nature and God, 
but one can't say as much for those who love 
man — a man, to put it more definitely. 

Dear Cornelia! poor Cornelia! This reminds 
me of my dear mother, who always expressed 
her gentle, heartfelt sympathy by the word 
"poor," "poor Louise," "poor dear Georgie," 
even when these children of her heart were but 
lightly in difficulties. 

I might write a week and yet not convey 
the agitation, distress, and sympathy which 
have moved our household over the crisis in 
Cornelia's affairs. There has been weeping 
and pretty nearly gnashing of teeth, for it is 
all so maddening in that we can only look on 
and follow the lead of a young girl. It is a 
month since she came to us, troubled and for- 
lorn, having left her lover in anger. The nice, 
refined country schoolmaster here has been 

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A COUNTRY WOMAN 

among her devotees since she came. He is 
much older than she, quiet, kindly, but utterly 
unworldly and unfitted to cope with the bread- 
and-butter problem of a household. His total 
salary as a country teacher about equals Cor- 
nelia's fairly modest allowance for clothes and 
sundries. He is rather good-looking and very 
sympathetic, and fell deeply in love with our 
charming Cornelia. Angelica, who has dis- 
cernment, warned us there was danger, but 
I was totally unprepared for Cornelia's announce- 
ment a week ago of her engagement to him. 
I nearly fainted, which is a good deal for a 
farmer. I begged, pleaded, commanded her to 
cease her folly, but all to no purpose. It is 
pique in part, I am sure, but the tender sym- 
pathy and really earnest, attractive nature of 
the school-teacher has won her regard, and not 
wanting to return to her old home, which is 
her lover's home, nor having any plan in life, 
now that the old love is off, the poor child 
cuts the knot by accepting the schoolmaster. 
She only consented after much lu-ging to go 
to the city and see her uncle and aunt, who 
are her guardians. In her inmost heart she 
doubtless hoped that some readjustment might 
come with her lover, and I was sure of it. They 
were in despair over her hasty action, and al- 

lOI 



THE JOURNAL OF 

most forbade her marriage to the schoolmaster, 
knowing her unfitness for a poor country 
school-teacher's wife. They begged her to take 
more time to decide. 

Raymond was absent on business, but re- 
turned before Cornelia left, and I fancy the 
meeting was tragic. In the joy of seeing each 
other they forgot for a moment their bitter 
parting and their grief, and fell into each other's 
arms in true lovers' fashion. Poor little Cor- 
nelia swallowed her pride and begged him to 
forget her hasty action and offered to break 
her engagement with the schoolmaster. 

Then, alas! that awful sense of justice in 
youth spoke up, and vowing that he loved her 
utterly and would to the end of his life, he 
absolutely refused to have her break the en- 
gagement, declaring he would not cause another 
man to suffer what he is suffering. And there 
it ended. 

Cornelia came back to the country with 
shining eyes and a determined mouth. No 
wisdom of the ages or the sages could have 
moved her, and to-day at sundown she was 
married to the schoolmaster on our lawn under 
the walnut trees. Our family and the friendliest 
neighbors gathered there. The schoolmaster 
is almost the last of an old Dutch family and 

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SCHOOLMASTER S ANCESTRAL HOME. THE CENTURV-AXD-A-H ALF 
OLD INN 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

had no kindred to come. Cornelia did not 
want her family friends, and asked only two 
or three intimate girl friends from the city. 

We made it as gay and beautiful as we could, 
and a fairer bride were hard to find, and the 
young girls in their filmy gowns made it quite 
a fairy scene. 

They are to live in the schoolmaster's ances- 
tral home, a mile distant from us, and as the 
twilight faded and the moon shone and the 
stars came out the young husband and wife 
walked hand in hand to their new, old home, 
surrounded by the galaxy of lovely girls who 
bade them good-by and Godspeed at their 
wreath-hung old Dutch door. 

The old house was made quite a bower of 
beauty by Amelia and Angelica, assisted by 
our household force. Cornelia herself seemed 
to take little interest. She swung in the ham- 
mock on our porch, listless and dreamy, while 
the old house was scoured and dainty curtains 
put up, rugs put down, the few pieces of fine 
old furniture belonging to the schoolmaster, 
rubbed up and put in place, and Cornelia's few 
belongings saved from her dead mother's treas- 
ures, adjusted to their new environment. Then 
the few but choice and useful wedding gifts 
were disposed to advantage, the great fireplace 

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THE JOURNAL OF 

piled with logs, the iron andirons brought from 
the attic, and everywhere flowers and wreaths 
of green. 

George, our houseman, was there to light 
the candles and the hearth fire before the 
bride came home, and will stay a day or two 
to light the kitchen fire and keep house until 
the little lady takes up her life task in her 
quaint old home. 

The schoolmaster bought a cow and some 
chickens, which will pay their own way. A 
horse and carriage are not for poor people, 
but the walking is good on our country roads, 
and there are delightful walks. School open- 
ing is postponed a week for the wedding, so 
Cornelia will not be alone in beginning the 
new life. She is to spend a day in each week with 
us, and we shall go to her as often as we can. 

When the girls came back we were sitting 
in the moonlight still, amid the wedding 
wreaths, talking of youth and love and life — 
so mysterious and so blessed. Some one was 
playing weird, sad airs on the flute. All otir 
gayety had vanished. The girls strayed a 
little from us and sat in a circle on the grassy 
slope, their arms intertwined, and not a word 
from them. I suspect there were some wet 
eyes and sympathetic hand-clasps. 

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A COUNTRY WOMAN 

September Twenty-eighth. It has been a 
month of perfect days, the crowning glory of 
a beautiful summer. The harvests are gar- 
nered and the clear, cool evenings remind us of 
a new season's coming. But so gently has 
the change come, so softly the September breezes 
have blown the tinted leaves from the trees, 
and so hot and summery are the midday hours 
that one hardly realizes the subtle change 
going on. Then nature is so abundant in her 
September gifts, and flowers and fruits and 
vegetables were never more abundant. The 
early varieties are gone, but from now on until 
late October we shall have luscious grapes, 
rosy-cheeked apples, golden pears, and plenty 
of flowers and vegetables of the hardier kinds. 

The spacious cellar begins to look like its 
old-time self. A wagon-load of dropped apples 
was taken to the mill last week and brought 
back as cider to be preserved for winter use. 
Boxes of sand and loam to hold the winter 
celery, carrots, parsnips, onions, beets, and 
turnips have been put in place. Pears and the 
choicest apples were picked, wrapped in paper 
and stored in barrels, leaving an abundant 
supply out of doors, even after selling a 
quantity. 

The corn has been husked and brought in, 
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THE JOURNAL OF 

while the stalks stand in great shocks, to be 
later stacked beside the bam. The nut trees 
are loaded and after heavier frosts we shall 
have nutting parties to gather in a store for 
winter use. 

The gentle oxen are carting our winter wood 
from the wood lot, and great piles of it have 
been sawed and piled ready for use. How rich 
we are! It seems almost wicked to use the 
good things of the garden, orchard, and forest 
as freely as we do. The narrow pinching of 
many thousands of refined people in the city 
and the real poverty of others enjoins upon us 
care of the bounties lying all about us, that 
there shall not be waste. In spite of this and of 
the fact that hearty chickens and pigs await the 
surplus of garden and orchard with impatience, 
one feels like summoning gentle people to enjoy 
the fruits and vegetables and flowers that seem 
to produce an hundredfold and load us with 
good things. 

September Thirtieth. Yesterday Amelia 
and Angelica returned to college, leaving us 
lonely enough. The summer's work and play 
had made them hardy and happy. We shall 
all be together again for two or three weeks at 
the holiday season, when we are to have a 
house party with as many friends coming as we 

io6 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

can store away in the Old Homestead. And 
then how the big logs will bum in the great 
fireplace, and the home-made candles light us 
merrily about the quaint old house, and to the 
cellar to bring forth the good things now being 
stored there! 

Candle-making was a very interesting proc- 
ess, for which we called in the assistance of 
two old gentlewomen of the neighborhood who 
had made them in years gone by and had kept 
the molds. I remember seeing them made here 
when I was a very little girl, and I have always 
kept one of the old candle-molds in the hope 
that I might some day use it. Our work turned 
out successfully and we have a chest of four 
hundred candles in the attic which will light 
our ways during the year. We can turn on the 
electric light at the stables and on the porch, 
and even in the house on a pinch, but everyone 
scorns to use it in the country where there are 
candles and moonlight and starlight. We are 
in the country partly to get back the poetry 
of living. 

Something new is happening all the time, 
and the most exhilarating place I know of is a 
farm. We no more than had Cornelia settled 
with her schoolmaster in his quaint ancestral 
home, than George the Slav announced that 

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THE JOURNAL OF 

his wife and children were coming from the old 
country. What to do with them became the 
question of the hour. George was helpless and 
looked to me to provide a place. He had not 
wanted them to come, knowing they were com- 
fortably fixed at home and his fifteen-year-old 
boy earning fair wages with a farmer there. 
But a Slav woman in the nearby town, through 
whom George has transacted such business as 
he has, as sending money home and the like, 
sent word to his wife that George was paying 
attention to a young Slav woman and she 
would better come to America. George scorn- 
fully avers that he has not seen the young 
woman for two years, and looks deeply worried 
as to the future home he is to set up. 

"Me no place for wife and children," mutters 
George every day, and seeing the puckers on 
his brow and the trouble in his eyes, I sallied 
forth in search of a home for the newcomers. 
Fortunately, I was able to rent a little, old 
cottage on a neighboring farm for fotu* dollars 
a month, and we are sending over a stove not 
in use, and some necessary furnishings, so that 
Mrs. George the Slav will not be homeless on 
her arrival in this hospitable land. 

I am opposed to all immigration to our coun- 
try for the next fifty years, believing we have 

1 08 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

more foreigners now than can be properly 
Americanized, but this is an accomplished fact, 
and at least they will settle in the country. It 
meant either George must leave us and try to 
take care of his family in the overcrowded city, 
away from the only work he knows, or we must 
help him shoulder the burden here. They can 
dispose of some of our surplus fruit and vege- 
tables and wood, and the wife doubtless will be 
a good worker and find plenty of work to do 
here and there in the neighborhood. 

October Fifth. The leisure I hoped to find, 
but which was a rare thing in the summer, is 
one of the joys of this autimin time — leisure to 
read, to study, to write, to think, to see and 
enjoy my friends, and even to loaf. Two or 
three hours a day of work and supervision out 
of doors and in, and the other twelve or four- 
teen waking hoiurs are reasonably free. We 
have all been so diligent this summer, doing 
the work needed to be done in season, that now 
the time of rest and change to other congenial 
occupations is really here, stretching all through 
the quiet fall and winter months if we could but 
tarry here, and promising joy and mental and 
spiritual renewal. 

At least we shall stay until after Thanks- 
giving and come back for the holiday season; 

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but necessity seems to point to a few months 
in town, so we shall make a virtue of necessity. 
In these golden autumn days I am having long 
walks and talks with Martha, our poet, and 
we are reading together — the very latest novels 
and poetry, a luxury I only had time for 
snatches of before. The very spirit of our own 
time must breathe in the best of these, and 
they take us out of the practical into the ideal 
world for a little while. Then for our solitary 
hours we take up whatever line of reading or 
study fits into our individual schemes of work. 
The habit of early rising gives me long morning 
hours when the mind is freshest and most 
alert. The afternoons are mostly for social 
and neighborhood life and to work out our arts 
and crafts plans with the cooperation of the 
neighbors. 

Cornelia is proving my loyal helper, now 
that Amelia and Angelica have gone back to 
college, and comes twice a week to help in 
the weaving and other handicrafts, and to 
cheer us with her music. With the marvelous 
adaptability of the American girl she has 
taken up her new life courageously, and tries 
to find peace and content in the new duties 
and to give pleasure to all whom she meets. 
With her I can leave the social and crafts work 

no 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

I have begun, during the winter season when 
I must be away, and so my problems get them- 
selves solved as they arise. If we are obedient 
to our visions, the ability and opportunity to 
do the things we dream of is sure to follow. 

October Eighth. To-day we began an his- 
torical pilgrimage which is to be continued on 
fair days until the weather is too cold for 
pleasure in it. It is a pilgrimage of our county, 
one of the most historic in the Union, and 
beautiful and picturesque as well. Here the 
cheery Dutch settlers landed and explored 
and made settlements before the Puritans ever 
sighted their barren New England coast. Here 
they developed a tolerant, peaceful, and pros- 
perous civilization, whose ancient homesteads 
still set forth the stability and honesty and 
love of beauty of their builders and founders. 
Here they helped to put the progressive ideas 
of their homeland into the fundamental law 
of their adopted country. Here battles of 
the Revolution were fought and tragic events 
connected with it occurred, and here through 
all the years the development of agricultiire 
and of the arts and industries have gone on, 
so that our county is a world in itself and 
one to be proud of and to love. 

It is a happiness to know well and love 
III 



THE JOURNAL OF 

some particular little portion of our great 
land as well as to cherish a patriotic pride 
and affection for the entire country in all 
its grandetir and achievement. Few things are 
finer in human nature than this clinging to 
native places and contributing, if we may, to 
their well-being. 

On our pilgrimage we mean to gather rec- 
ords and books and maps and pictures of 
places and events to keep in the Old Home- 
stead, for our own use and satisfaction and 
for the neighborhood people, who are unlikely 
to make much use of the county historical 
society collections. From the scattered an- 
cient houses we may pick up reminiscences and 
traditions from descendants of the earlier 
times, and perhaps some furniture of the 
forefathers. 

I shall be as much interested in the old 
stone houses, ancient stone kitchens, colonial 
Dutch doorways, and roofs, old looms and 
brass and delft ware, bedspreads and home- 
spun linen, as in the places of the first settle- 
ments, or Washington's headquarters and the 
route of marching Revolutionary soldiers, or 
the place where Andr^ met his tragic fate. 

October Twelfth. A doubting friend has 
written me that I never said anjrthing about the 

112 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

dark side of country life ! But have I not per- 
sistently affirmed that foresight and hard work 
are prime elements of country life? This with 
the uncertainty of the seasons and its effect on 
crops, the multitude of insect pests, seeking a 
living as we are out of the fruits of the earth, 
occasional sickness and death among our flocks 
and herds and the difficulty of getting com- 
petent farm help — these are what I would say 
constitute the difficult but not the dark side of 
country life. There is no dark side unless one 
happens to go in beyond his depth financially, 
but this is not peculiar to farm life, and less 
fatal to it than to some other kinds of business. 
To get joy out of coimtry life one wants to 
plan and work and live well within one's means. 

I have not dwelt much on my difficulties, 
knowing that everyone has plenty of his own 
to draw upon. The occasional failures in crops, 
partly due to Providence and partly to George 
the Slav, I have left unrecorded. It has been 
a simmier rich in delights, sitting at the feet of 
Nature and learning her marvelous ways, not 
rich through the harvests and the increase in 
our live stock, though they have done their 
best ungrudgingly. 

However, my account books, kept in Amelia's 
clear handwriting for the most of the season, 

113 



THE JOURNAL OF 

are not bad reading, and I do not hesitate to 
put down here some results of my farming 
experiment. 

This is what we sold or used from April 
first to October first, and the cows did not 
really become domiciled and at their best 
until well along in April. 

1700 qts. cream at .22 $374.00 

8^ doz. eggs at .28 23 . 24 

90 lbs. spring chk. at .25 22 . 50 

120 lbs. fowl at .18 21 .60 

320 lbs. yoiing pork at .11 35 • 20 

250 lbs. pork at .10 25.00 

30 baskets Bartlett pears at .60 18.00 

12 barrels apples at 2.50 30.00 

Tomatoes, beans, early cabbages 15 • 7° 

50 bu. potatoes at .65 32 • 50 

2 calves 20.70 

360 qts. milk at .06 2 1 . 60 

40 lbs. butter at .30 12 .00 

Total sold $652 . 04 

180 pts. cream at .11 $19.80 

no doz. eggs at .28 30.80 

120 lbs. spring chk. at .25 30.00 

55 lbs. fowl at .18 9-90 

Vegetables, estimated 47 . 00 

Fruit, estimated 6 1 . 00 

360 qts. milk at .06 2 1 . 60 

77 lbs. butter at .30 23 . 10 

Total used $243 . 20 

Grand total $895 . 24 

Comparing income and expenditures, and es- 
114 



A COUNTRY WOMAN 

timating the use of the homestead as equivalent 
to the interest on the investment in the place, I 
find that the returns from the farm, garden, 
and stock covered cost of outdoor labor, cost 
of seed, fertilizers, poultry and stock feed, 
interest on stock and equipment, taxes, and 
insurance. 

The returns of a higher kind, which cannot 
be counted up in figures, must not be forgotten. 
Now when the leaves have turned and "the 
frost is on the pumpkin," reminders come of 
the beaten track and the necessity of going 
back to it. But what treasure we have found 
and will take with us to the more intense and 
richly human life of the city! The vital, ac- 
tive, real life of the country has been a renewal 
of the whole being. You waken mornings con- 
scious of joy in being alive, and of the need of 
your particular services in the scheme of things. 
You have stored up youth and strength from 
the eternal youth and vigor of mother earth 
and her uprising children, and feel really able 
to remove mountains — a power you had hith- 
erto looked upon as scripture hyperbole. You 
sleep because you are sleepy, needing no pow- 
ders; eat to satisfy real hunger, though no 
tonic has built up the appetite. Every kind 
of exercise through work has renewed you, 

115 



JOURNAL OF A COUNTRY WOMAN 

without patent apparatus to help through a 
tiresome round. 

Best of all, you realize health and joy in 
living as the normal condition, and dependent 
upon the relation of man to the earth and the 
animal kingdom which was fixed at the be- 
ginning of things and may not be changed 
permanently but with loss physical and 
spiritual. 

What Walt Whitman said of American de- 
mocracy applies to the individuals who make up 
the democracy — that it "must either be fibered, 
vitalized, by regular contact with outdoor 
light and air and growths, farm scenes, animals, 
fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth, and free skies, 
or it will morbidly dwindle and pale." There 
is a blazing log fire on the hearth this cool 
October day, and the whispering tongues of 
flame invite us appealingly to often journey 
countryward in winter days and find what 
delights the country in winter has for people 
with souls. 



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LIBRARY OF CX)NGRESS 

0DDE74fiflflai 



